


I’m Gonna Keep You in Love with Me (for a While)

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Anal Sex, Bedsharing, Hand Jobs, Las Vegas Wedding, M/M, Oral Sex, Rimming, also "dude" but I don't make the rules okay, also real married, fake married, friends to husbands to lovers to ???, just assume most of the kinds of sex are present here, possible dubious consent due to alcohol consumption, probably more Celine Dion than you were hoping for, they say "fuck" a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 04:30:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14585001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: Shane is pacing around the hotel room. It’s not a huge room and Shane’s legs are long enough that he doesn’t have much real estate to pace before he has to swing back around for another loop.“Can you stop?” Ryan asks. “You’re making me dizzy.”“Okay,” Shane says finally. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going to—we’re going to be married. The only way out is through.”“Um,” Ryan says, because this plan strikes him as counterproductive to their shared goal of not being married.





	I’m Gonna Keep You in Love with Me (for a While)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a business trip I took to Las Vegas a few weeks ago, that one Buzzfeed video where Keith, Shane, and that other guy let Twitter plan their night in Vegas, and my own unrelenting BFU feelings. There are some great married-in-Vegas fics in this fandom already, but I wanted to do something a little longer and a lot stupider, so here we are. 
> 
> Title’s from “Dark Side of the Gym” by The National, as is contractually obligated. Check out the great music video because it is, as the kids say, A Mood. 
> 
> The bit about love and attention being the same thing is paraphrased from the excellent 2017 movie Lady Bird.
> 
> The Mike mentioned in an early scene is Mike Rose (Ladylike producer Mike), not Mike Carrier (Outsmarted Mike).
> 
> AO3 is being weird about not displaying word count on this, so FYI it's about ~21,800 in Word.

*

Ryan’s earned a lot of hangovers in his life, but he can tell that this one’s going to be one for the record books. A real doozy.

There’s a beam of sunlight angled directly into his eyes and a weird sour taste in his mouth that he can’t identify. The sheets are cool against his skin, the single thing about his current physical condition that isn’t causing him misery. He allows himself to lie still for a few long moments, waiting for the sweet release of death.

As his faculties return to him one by one, Ryan becomes aware of two strange things:

First, he is not alone in this hotel bed. Someone is pressed up against his back, closer than Ryan likes to sleep with people as a general rule.  A hand is casually resting on his stomach, under the covers. Ryan’s not used to being the little spoon, and it’s intimate and claustrophobia-inducing.

Second, the person sharing the bed is snoring deeply. The person does not sound particularly female, which would be without precedent in the long and storied history of Ryan’s regrettable alcohol-fueled decisions.

Ryan wracks his brain for memories of last night, but he comes up more or less blank. He remembers going out with the guys after the shoot. He remembers Habersberger yelling “VEGAS, BABY!!!” like every ten minutes. He remembers shots, so many shots. He remembers a succession of dance floors, a dope beat thrumming in his body, feeling fucking amazing. And then—nothing.

Ryan tries to swivel his head around like an owl to see who’s in this bed with him, but he can’t turn around far enough to get a good look without moving more of his body, and he’s not ready to risk it. He takes stock. Other than the dry mouth, the pounding headache, the nausea—he feels okay. A little sore in his shoulders and back, maybe, but demonstrably alive.

Ryan cranes his neck again, trying to see. His neck cracks, and the snoring stops abruptly. Ryan freezes.

“…the fuck?” a gravelly, sleep-thick voice mumbles.

Ryan knows that voice, he’s spent hundreds of hours of his life editing that voice. It’s Shane, and for just a split second Ryan is relieved that he’s not about to be stabbed by a black-market organ dealer who’s going to steal his liver and kidneys and leave him bleeding out in a hotel tub full of ice. His relief shifts back to confusion when his sluggish brain puts it together that the hand on his stomach must logically _also_ belong to Shane.

Abandoning the pretense of sleep, Ryan scoots away from Shane’s body, nearly falling off the bed, catching himself at the last minute.

“I’m dead,” Ryan tells Shane. “I’m dead from alcohol poisoning, I _died_ , and you’ve desecrated my corpse by—by _spooning_ with it all night.”

Shane’s quiet for a moment, stretching, bare shoulders and arms reaching up toward the ceiling. He winces audibly.

“If your corpse is desecrated, I don’t even want to think what’s happened to mine,” he says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t want to, um, alarm you, but I am _super_ not wearing any clothes right now.”

“Oh,” Ryan says.

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “ _Oh_.”

“You probably just—you probably just got undressed for bed and you over-did it.”

“Maybe,” Shane says. “But I don’t think so.”

That seems ominous.

“I’m kind of…sticky,” Shane says, delicately. “Where a person ought not to be sticky.”

“Oh God.”

Shane rolls over under the covers, away from Ryan, and fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand. He’s sleep-rumpled, hair sticking up all over the place, and he looks like Ryan feels. _Naked, naked, he is naked!!_ Ryan’s inner monologue shrieks so loudly that it’s painful through the hangover haze.

Shane sits up, sheet wrapped carefully around his waist for the preservation of whatever modesty remains to him. Ryan notes with the very small part of his brain still working that Shane’s got a handful of marks on his neck and chest that look questionable at best. He presses both hands to his temples.

“Ryan, are you freaking out?” Shane asks a moment later.

“Yes. Yes, I am freaking out. Are you freaking out?”

“I mean, a little? I dunno.”

Shane has his left hand over his mouth, rubbing at his lips, and that’s when Ryan notices the thing on his hand.

“Dude, are you wearing a fucking Ring-Pop?”

Shane flexes his fingers carefully and pries off the stubby remains of a Ring Pop from his ring finger. He looks down at his hand for a moment, considering. Then his eyes go wide.

Shane stands up quickly, pulling the bedsheet with him, still wrapped around himself like an absurd toga. Ryan knows he should look away, give him some privacy, but the frantic look on Shane’s face has a disturbing, compelling car crash quality to it.

“Oh no,” Shane mutters to himself, searching around the bed for something. “Oh no, oh no, oh fuck.”

“Dude, what--?”

“My phone. Ryan, where’s my _fucking_ phone?” Shane’s kicking at pillows, leaning down to look under the bed, under the nightstand.

Ryan finds both of their phones next to the TV. He tosses Shane’s to him and reflexively swipes to unlock his own.

_28 unread messages._

He has missed calls from at least four coworkers, their boss, several friends, his brother, and—most alarmingly—his _mother_.

“Oh, shit,” he says.                                              

Shane is bent over his phone, intent, watching something. Ryan can hear tinny voices, some “whoooo”ing, a laugh that must be his own distinctive one.

“Oh holy Jesus,” Shane whispers again. He tosses his phone back at Ryan, and it lands on the end of the bed. “Watch—watch that.”

Ryan picks up the phone, looks down at the screen. It’s his own Instagram. He presses play, and video of him and Shane fills the screen. He can’t figure out where they are—all of Las Vegas is just neon lights and tacky décor.

As Ryan watches with dawning horror, video-Shane lifts his left hand, wriggles his fingers to draw attention to the Ring Pop there, not yet eaten. Then video-Ryan laughs and swoops in and just like that, they’re making out. Real Ryan watches in sick fascination as his drunk-ass self laughs into Shane’s mouth and shoves his tongue down Shane’s throat.

The video cuts off then, but there’s text splayed across the bottom, hot pink bubble letters. “MARRIED BITCHES!!!” And a fucking ring emoji.

There are thousands and thousands of comments and likes.

Shane falls down on the bed again, face-down. He’s muttering to himself again, muffled by the bed.

“What did we do, what did we do, what did we do.”

 _I’m going to be sick_ , Ryan thinks. The minute he thinks it, it’s coming true, and he’s running to the bathroom and slamming the door behind him.

*

He emerges some time later, stomach purged of its contents, face damp from the water he’s splashed on it. Shane is dressed now, in a fresh set of his own clothes, so Ryan thinks they must be in Shane’s hotel room. He’s still scrolling through social media, but his eyes have a glazed-over look.

“I’m sure it was just a dumb joke,” Ryan says, because he has to say something.

“The internet doesn’t think it’s a dumb joke,” Shane says. He looks more serious than Ryan’s ever seen him. “The internet thinks we got fucking married last night, Ryan! Like, for real _married_.”

He shows Ryan his Twitter. There’s a picture of them in front of one of those tacky-ass wedding chapels. Shane is smiling into Ryan’s hair. His hand is disappearing up the front of Ryan’s shirt.

“There’s no way,” Ryan scoffs, but without conviction. He’s clammy all over. It feels like his _tongue_ is sweating and about three times too big for his mouth. “Even if we—even if we wanted to, _which we did not_ , I’m pretty sure you have to get a marriage license even in Vegas.”

Shane brandishes a little white slip of paper at Ryan, and then lets it fall to the ground.

“There was receipt in my wallet. $77, paid in cash. At the fucking Las Vegas Marriage Bureau, 11:34 pm.”

“What kind of place has a marriage bureau that’s open after 11 pm on a Thursday night?”

“Exactly this kind of place, Ryan. It’s _fucking Vegas_!”

“What are we going to do?”          

“I don’t know. If we’d just kept our mouths fucking shut about it we could get it annulled pretty easily. But I don’t know how to clean this up,” Shane says, gesturing at the phone. “All these people think we got married _for real_.  Because of, like, feelings and shit.  And there’s going to be a real marriage license that’s a matter of public record.”

All Ryan can think is, _what will my mom say?_

“People don’t like being lied to, Ryan. Everybody’s going to be so, so pissed at us.  We’re going to look like the biggest fucking assholes on the planet if we try to no homo our way out of this.”  

Shane is pacing around the hotel room. It’s not a huge room and Shane’s legs are long enough that he doesn’t have much real estate to pace before he has to swing back around for another loop.

“Can you stop?” Ryan asks. “You’re making me dizzy.”

“Okay,” Shane says finally. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going to—we’re going to be married.  The only way out is through.”

“Um,” Ryan says, because this plan strikes him as counterproductive to their shared goal of _not_ being married.

“No, listen. We’re going to be married for a while, and then we’ll just,” Shane waves his hands through the air vaguely, “you know. Like, oh, we rushed into things, we didn’t know what we were getting into, we tried to make it work, blah blah blah. We divorce amicably. We stay friends. It’s all fine!” 

This does not sound, to Ryan, _fine_. He wonders if Shane is still drunk.

“This is a crazy plan,” Ryan says. “You realize this is crazy, right?  You sound like an insane person right now.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Couldn’t we just do the annulment thing, like you said? Tell people the truth, and then apologize a lot?”

“No, Ryan. The truth is a disaster. The truth is for quitters. We did a stupid thing and now we’re going to bluff our way out of it.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Eight months? A year, tops.”

“You want me to be married to your ass for a _year_?”

“It has to be long enough to be believable. We spend most of our time together anyway. I’ll move into your place for a while, we’ll sell the shit out of it, and then it’ll be done.  It’ll be like scripting the show, but bigger.”

“Or,” Ryan says, “I could murder you right now, and then off myself, and we can just be dead.”

“I think being married to me is just a hair preferable to a murder-suicide pact.”

“It’s really not!”

“Look, dude. It’s too late, we’ve already fucked up massively and publicly. The Ryan Bergara who existed before you plastered a video of us making out all over the internet and then, oh yeah, _we got fucking married_ —he doesn’t exist anymore. All we can do now is try to extricate ourselves from this without completely ruining our careers and hurting people we care about.” 

When Shane says _making out_ , Ryan flushes. He doesn’t know what to do about that part of this yet and he’s not ready to deal with it, so he puts a pin in it, sets it to the side.

“Okay,” he says finally, because going along with Shane’s hairbrained schemes is usually how these things work out. That’s the dynamic they roll with and he doesn’t know how to break out of it: Ryan spends his life looking over his shoulder to see who’s paying attention, to make sure someone’s laughing, ready to modulate or apologize. Shane’s full-speed-ahead, on to the next thing, while Ryan’s still trying to keep up.

“Yeah, fine. This is the worst idea anyone has ever had, but sure. Let’s be married.”

*

They order room service, scrambled eggs and greasy bacon to fight the hangover. Together they invent some memories, write an Instagram text post, craft an email to their boss. Ryan’s gut says _this is a lie, this is lying,_ but he swallows it down and calls his mom back anyway.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says while she yells in his ear. “I’m sorry, I wanted you to be there too.” _Liar, liar, you fucking liar._

Shane calls his parents next, and his performance is so convincing that it makes Ryan feel worse. He has a giant smile plastered on his face, and it’s almost—but not quite—what Shane looks like when he’s genuinely excited, when he’s happy. For a minute Ryan can nearly believe it himself.

“Thank you, thanks!” Shane is saying into the phone. “I can’t wait for you to meet him. My—husband. God, that feels weird to say!” His smile falters. His eyes meet Ryan’s across the bed, and Ryan fully appreciates for the first time just how fucked they both are.

*

_Hey guys—Sorry for the heart attacks. We’ve been thinking about how to tell you all for a while, and then we just decided to go big or go home. We promise it won’t affect the show, it’s just that we were the real cowardly shitfish all along. We’re going to take a little time for us—more soon._

_Ryan and Shane_

_*_

The guys give them a reasonable amount of time, but eventually Keith breaks and texts Shane.

_Food? or r u…busy  [eggplant emoji]_

_We could eat._

_Yeah I’ll fuckin bet you could_

_What does that even mean?_

_Meet me and Mike at the bar downstairs in 15, I ordered some burgs_

“I am,” Keith says a few minutes later through a mouthful of burger, “I confess, shocked. You could knock me over with a feather.”

Shane shrugs, biting into a burger of his own.

“Yeah, I’m sorry we didn’t tell you guys sooner. We just didn’t want to make it weird at work.”

Keith chews thoughtfully. “Sure, I get it. Wouldn’t want to make it _weird_. At _Buzzfeed_.”

“You know what I mean. It seemed unprofessional.”

“Unprofessional? At the place where I am routinely paid to wear women’s underwear?”

“It seemed like the right decision at first,” Ryan interjects, “and then it was like so much time had passed that it would be weirder to tell everybody than to just…let it ride.”

Ryan badly wants to piece together what happened last night, and he thinks Keith might possess valuable information. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to make it too obvious that he and Shane have zero recollection of anything that happened after 10 o’clock. Both because it will make their story seem more suspicious and because tapping out that early is just fucking embarrassing. 

“Remind me, did we tell you what we were up to?” Ryan asks as casually as he can.

“Nope!” Keith says. “Everybody was dancing, and then you guys were dancing, and then you were _dancing_ ,” he wiggles his eyebrows, “and then you were gone.”

“And you didn’t, like, wonder where we went?”

“No, man. Did you _see_ you? I assumed you’d gone off to a bathroom to bang it out, so obviously I group texted everybody _immediately_.”

Keith pulls out his phone, scrolls, and foists it across the table at Ryan.

Shane’s face is pale and drawn, but he’s valiantly fighting his way through the burger. “Come on, dude, not cool,” he says.

“Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to _not_ share the best gossip anybody’d heard in months? You know I’m powerless in the face of hot goss.”

Ryan reads through the messages in the group chat.

Keith: _ATTENTION TEAM, madej and bergara are DRY HUMPING on the DANCE FLOOR OF THIS CLUB RN_

eugene: _Pics or gtfo_

jen: _You liar!_

Keith: _no!!! they just disapparated so i guess that’s a thing now. VEGAS BABY_

Zach: _wait **what**_

Keith: _*disappeared_

Zach: _oh_ _:(_

mike: _It’s true, I saw it too and I can never unsee it._

Ned Fulmer: _Am I going to have to deal with HR this weekend? Don’t text me this shit man._

Quinta: _lets leave the registered nurses out of this_

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” Ryan says, reading only the first dozen or so messages before pushing the phone back across the table. He’s a fairly private guy, and the idea of all his friends and coworkers speculating about him and Shane makes him feel a little queasy all over again.

“In my defense, you told the literal whole internet half an hour later anyway.”

“Fuck the internet,” Shane says. Keith takes another obscene, giant bite of burger. Ryan pokes at his own, willing himself to eat it, but just watching Keith slam his is too much for his stomach.

“So how long has this been a thing?” Mike asks. It’s the first time he’s said anything, other than a quick hello when they arrived. Mike is smart, and also Ryan has this vague uneasy feeling that because Mike is gay he’s going to sniff them out immediately for the giant liars they are. He doesn’t _think_ gaydar is real, but then Ryan wouldn’t know, would he?

“Since we started doing the show,” Shane says, sipping his water, cool as a cucumber. This was something they’d worked out earlier. “We didn’t plan this, obviously. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.”

“I didn’t even think you were into men,” Mike says, giving them an appraising look. Mike’s known them a long time, has seen them both cycle through girlfriends and leave parties with women. Ryan shifts in his chair, then remembers that’s a thing people do when they’re lying. He forces himself to sit still.

“Nobody ever asked,” Shane says with a shrug. “Not everybody’s comfortable enough with that stuff to put it all out there for the views.  I’ve never really talked about relationships at work and I didn’t see the need to start now.”

Ryan can tell from the heat on his face that he must be blushing.

“I, uh, wasn’t really. This just happened.” That seems insufficient, so he blurts out, “Sexuality is a spectrum!”

“Very true,” Mike agrees. “Well, congratulations. Most people don’t come out and get married in one fell swoop, but I’m really happy for you both.”

“Thanks, man,” Shane says. He reaches out to shake Mike’s hand across the table and winks roguishly at Ryan for Keith and Mike’s benefit. For the eighth or ninth time today Ryan feels like the biggest piece of shit on the planet. He’s certain there’s a circle of hell reserved specifically for straight guys who pretend to be LGBT so their YouTube audience doesn’t yell at them.

_How are we going to do this for a whole year?_

*

Ryan and Shane take a week off work, effective immediately, and go back home to clean up the mess as best they can.

“Enjoy your honeymoon ;)” their boss emails back. “We’ll talk about the show when you get back, but no worrying!”

They shut off their phones and go about the business of combining their lives. Shane sublets his apartment and moves his stuff into Ryan’s place, because Ryan’s shitty one-bedroom is just a little bigger and a little closer to work than Shane’s own.

“Plus side, we’re going to save a lot of money,” he points out, lugging the last box up to Ryan’s apartment. “Sharing rides to work, splitting the cost of rent and bills.”

“That’s true,” Ryan concedes, like this _isn’t_ the weirdest thing anyone’s ever done.

They cram Shane’s dresser into Ryan’s bedroom and stand back to survey the room. There is, of course, just the one bed. Shane left his back at his place, along with other bigger pieces of furniture, for the subletter—and there’d be nowhere to put it anyway.

“I can sleep on the couch,” Shane says, pinching at his nose and staring at the bed.  

“Dude, you’re longer than the couch,” Ryan says, “and you’ll develop back problems. I think we have to share the bed. What if somebody comes over unexpectedly? It’d blow the whole thing.”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “Well, it’s a big bed.”

“Not with you in it, it won’t be.”

“I’ll stay on my side.  It’s not like we haven’t shared beds before.”

It’s true, they’ve shared beds lots while traveling for the show. And, of course, in Vegas—Ryan still isn’t ready to think about that. But this is different. Ryan hasn’t shared a bed with someone for more than a night or two since his last serious girlfriend, which was over a year ago. The idea of sharing his space like this with someone, someone who’s a roommate but also _not_ , gives him a flurry of nerves that he hadn’t expected.

“I think we should probably lay out some ground rules,” Ryan says. “Or, not rules, but—guidelines. For how we’re going to do this, and what’s okay and what isn’t.”

“Okay,” Shane agrees. “Like what? Like, no sharing toothbrushes?”

“Like, what we’re comfortable doing in public. What our lives will look like in private, while we’re—” he still can’t bring himself say _married_ out loud— “doing this.”

Shane nods, thinking.

“Here’s one: no weird shit at work.”

“That should be easy enough, nobody’s going to expect us to be all over each other at work anyway. What about after work, out with friends and stuff, or visiting family?”

“I think we can just say we don’t want to make people uncomfortable, if anybody asks. I’m okay with, like, handholding and stuff. Hugging or whatever.  Pecks on the cheek.  Parents eat that shit up.”

Ryan isn’t really a hugger, but he can handle that.

“And at home?”

“At home, we’ll just be friends and roommates. Ryan and Shane. Pals, coworkers. Nothing has to change. I’ll respect your personal space, you respect mine, we’ll play a shit-ton of video games, and in eight months to a year we’ll extricate ourselves gracefully and be the best divorced friends anybody’s ever had.”

Shane says this with great confidence, but he doesn’t look as sure as he sounds.

“You seem to have this all figured out.”

“I told you, I have a plan. What about sex?”

“Uh, what—” Ryan stutters. “No, um, I don’t? No sex?” It comes out more like a question than a statement, less firm than he’d intended. He wants to sink into the floor.

“Jesus, Ryan. With other people.” Shane rolls his eyes to the ceiling and he doesn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. “Like, is it cool if we meet someone, if we bring them home? Should we have some kind of signal?”

“What, like a sock on the door? I’m not sure where you’re imagining meeting these girls. Every woman who knows enough to Google you is going to find out you’re married _to a man_ within five minutes.”

“It was just a hypothetical question!” Shane says.  His arms are crossed over his chest in a defensive posture, and Ryan’s brain warns him that this is turning into a fight but he’s powerless to prevent it.

Ryan can feel himself getting disproportionately upset and he’s not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because until this very moment he hadn’t fully realized that this scheme was going to require from him in the celibacy department. If either of them gets caught picking up girls they’re fucked, and it was all for nothing. And—more than that—now that Ryan’s really thinking about it, it feels _wrong_ somehow. He weighs the options, all of them bad, and decides.

“You can do what you want,” Ryan says, “but I’m not sleeping with anybody.” He almost says _anybody else_ , catches himself just in time.

“Well, no,” Shane says, “but you might want to, and when that happens I want you to feel like—”

“I’m sure I’ll want to, but I won’t,” Ryan cuts him off. “Not for the duration. I’m not a cheater, Shane.”

“Not a…wait, what?”

‘I don’t cheat.”

“We’re not really married!” Shane throws up his hands. “It’s not cheating!”

Ryan hates that he feels as strongly about this as he apparently does, but there it is. His insides squirm at the idea of bringing some girl home, while there’s a marriage certificate sitting in a courthouse somewhere that says he’s married to somebody else.

“Hard truth, Shane: we are, in fact, _really married_. The state of Nevada says we’re married. The state of California agrees. We are legally, actually, extremely married.  The fact that we don’t have warm cuddly feelings about each other doesn’t make it less true.”

Shane sits down on the bed, hard enough to make it creak in protest. His face is blank, and Ryan feels a little bad for raising his voice. He knows he’s not the only one going through some stuff.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan says after a moment. “You can do what you want, I’m not going to hold you to it. But even if I don’t remember doing it, I did take a—a vow.” He feels stupid even as he says it, like a naïve child, and he braces himself for Shane to make fun of him.

But Shane doesn’t make fun of him. He unfolds his arms, leans back on the bed, and looks up Ryan. The expression on his face is softer than Ryan’s expecting.

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Okay. You traditionalist, you. This is going to fucking suck, you know that, right?”

Ryan nods and fishes the key out of his pocket, the copy of his apartment key that he had made for Shane at Home Depot. He sets it on Shane’s dresser and makes to leave the bedroom, grabbing a box of Shane’s DVDs to take into the living room and put with his own collection.

“Why do you think we did it?” Shane asks from behind him, just as Ryan’s about through the doorway. “What the fuck were we thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan says, and it feels like the truth. “We were drunk and lonely, I guess. I was having a good time. We got swept up in the Vegas thing. I’m sure this kind of thing happens all the time.”

“I guess.” Shane says, but he looks dubious. “I remember it a little. Like, bits and pieces. But I still don’t remember the _why_. I don’t remember making a decision, and that’s the thing that’s driving me crazy.  Because I’m a logical person and this was not logical.”

 _What do you remember_? Ryan wants to ask. _Tell me everything._ But he’s still not ready to know, so he doesn’t.

*

The next week when they return to work, there’s a banner hanging above their desks that reads “JUST MARRIED <3 <3 <3” in glitter paint. Shane sees it first because he’s ten feet tall, and when he stops in his tracks Ryan crashes into his back like they’re in a Three Stooges skit.

“This is going to make a great ‘Why I Left Buzzfeed’ video,” Shane says with feeling.

They haven’t talked a whole lot about how they’ll handle this at work, but the general plan is just to keep acting like themselves and hope everybody assumes they’re keeping private things private. Ryan’s not afraid to commit to a bit, though.

The minute he catches sight of them slinking in, Curly hoots, “Helloo, lovebirds! Your fucking _gay_ _coup_ made my whole week!”

“Gay coup,” Shane repeats. He does seem exhausted already, Ryan notices. It turns out that deception on a grand scale takes a lot out of a person.

“You look tired,” Curly says with relish. “I approve, my babies. How does this whole situation work, by the way?” He waves a hand up and down the length of Shane. “Never mind, we’ll talk specifics later.”

Ryan doesn’t know what “talking specifics” entails, and he hopes to God he never finds out.

They get in a couple of hours of work at their desks. It’s interrupted every ten minutes or so by people congratulating them, which wouldn’t be an unpleasant way to spend a morning if Ryan had done anything to earn their congratulations instead of just being a lying creep. His face starts to hurt a little from the fake smiling.

After lunch, Quinta lures them to the kitchen with the promise of free pizza. Along with the pizza, they discover that a party in their honor is already in full swing, complete with an entire case of cheap champagne.

“It’s barely noon,” Shane observes as Zack foists glasses of champagne on him and Ryan both. “But thank you.”

Kelsey swans up to them, also clutching glasses of champagne in each hand. Both glasses appear to be her own.

“I always said y’all had palpable sexual tension,” she says with emphasis, gesturing a little too wildly with one hand and spilling a bit of champagne on the floor. “ _Palpable_.”

“Uh,” Ryan says. “Yes. It’s true. It’s a mystery how I manage not to jump this guy’s bones every time we’re in a room together.”

“Did you ever, like,” Kelsey lowers her voice to a stage whisper, which is still pretty loud, because _Kelsey_ — “do it, in front of the ghosts?”

Shane’s shoulders are shaking from the effort of not laughing.

“That would be disrespectful,” he says the minute he can safely open his mouth. “To the dead.”

“We would never jeopardize the professionalism of a Buzzfeed video shoot,” Ryan agrees. He thinks Kelsey might be just tipsy enough to miss his sarcasm.

Ryan’s relieved when Kelsey’s response is cut off by a persistent clinking noise, until he realizes that the noise is Quinta hitting the side of her champagne flute with her fork. Ryan’s been to enough weddings to know what that means. He can feel his face heating up as others join in, until the kitchen is a cacophony of clinking glasses.

He wonders whose idea it was to give these irresponsible weirdos real glassware. They should really commission Buzzfeed sippy cups for the office.

“Kiss!” someone shouts from the back.

Ryan looks helplessly at Shane. They haven’t really talked about this, hadn’t thought it would come up so soon.

Shane shrugs a shrug so tiny that it’s almost imperceptible, and Ryan takes a moment to let himself be annoyed that Shane doesn’t look nearly as flummoxed by this situation as he himself feels. It’s a frustrating real-life echo of their onscreen dynamic: Ryan panicking and making a fool out of himself while Shane’s cool and unphased.

But Ryan doesn’t have much time to reflect on how unfair this is because Shane is leaning towards Ryan, bending down to whisper in his ear.

“They’re not going to stop. I’m just gonna—okay?”

And then he’s holding Ryan’s jaw, giving him time to pull away. When Ryan doesn’t pull away, Shane tilts Ryan’s head back and presses his lips to Ryan’s, softly at first. He deepens the kiss just a little—just enough to get a few hoots from the crowd—and then he’s pulling away again. The whole thing takes less than five seconds. It’s not a bad kiss, but it feels foreign and awkward. Unpracticed.

Ryan notes with satisfaction that the tips of Shane’s ears are pink. Not _entirely_ unflummoxed, then. Ryan knows that they’ve done this before; God knows he’s watched the video of it enough. But it feels like it’s the first time. How is it possible that people who know him, know _them_ , so well can watch them kiss and not tell they’re faking?

The whole thing is unsettling.

He corners Shane later that afternoon in a quiet hallway, as Shane’s on his way back from the bathroom.

“We are so fucking unprepared for this!” Ryan hisses, looking over his shoulder to make sure there’s nobody nearby.

“Is this about earlier? I’m sorry if that freaked you out, I just didn’t know what else to do. There are going to be times when we’re going to have to be a little—physical—or people will be suspicious.”

“I know that, I’m not an idiot. I just mean that we shouldn’t have wandered in here like innocent babes in the woods looking like we’ve never even kissed each other before. We should have, I don’t know, practiced or some shit!”

“You want to rehearse kissing?”

“No! I just, if we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right. If we blow this, if somebody figures out that we’re not really married—”

“But we _are_ really married.”

“You know what I fucking mean! I hate feeling unprepared, Shane. You know how I have to research everything. This is like one of those nightmares where I show up to class to take a test and I realize I don’t have a pencil and I haven’t studied and also I’m naked for some reason.” 

“What I’m hearing here is that you want to make out with me…for research.”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“And then something about you being naked.”

“No, that was a, a metaphor. Just, try it again.  From the top.”

For some reason, Ryan thinks it will be easier to do this here at work than it would be at home. Home is too private, somehow. The only place they have reserved for them, where they can be their real selves, not acting.

Shane steps into his space, and Ryan steps back until his back is against the wall of the hallway. Shane leans down again, places a hand on Ryan’s neck this time— _is this his go-to move? Is this something that very tall people always do when they kiss?_

“I think it was a simile, actually,” Shane murmurs, and then they’re kissing again, really kissing. It takes Ryan a little time to find the rhythm; he’s distracted by the angles, which are all different than he’s used to, but he gets the hang of it.

Shane kisses him almost lazily for a little bit. _Languid_ _is the word_ , Ryan thinks. _What would I do if I was kissing someone normally? What the fuck do I do with my hands?_

Ryan runs his hands up Shane’s sides and around to his back, which is surprisingly well-defined under Shane’s flannel. Shane responds immediately to up the ante—opening his mouth, more pressure, making the kiss a hair dirtier. He grabs Ryan by the hips, pushes in closer so they’re almost flush up against each other, and slips Ryan just a hint of tongue.

Ryan can feel some kind of instinct taking over, silencing his inner monologue, because he recognizes that Shane is good at this. Competitively, he wants Shane to think he’s good at it too. He wants to push back against Shane, close the inch of space between them, and somehow _win_. He doesn’t know what winning looks like in this scenario.

Suddenly there’s a wolf whistle, and Shane springs back from Ryan. Zack is coming down the hallway toward them, headed for the bathroom himself.

“Get a room, boys!” he says. “This is a communal space.”

“Sorry,” Shane says sheepishly.

“Newlyweds!” Zack says with a shake of his head, disappearing into the bathroom.                                

“That was pretty good,” Shane says, a little breathless. “Believable, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says faintly. “Believable.”

So much for no weird stuff at work. In the back of his mind he registers that his pulse is going just a little too fast, but it’s fine. He’s just really committed to the bit.

*

Work is awkward, but filming Unsolved is somehow worse.

 It’s Ryan’s baby, and he cares so much about the integrity of their shoots. He can’t shake the feeling that not only are they lying to their friends and family and the fans, but they’re lying to the show _itself_. Like the show is a living, breathing thing that can betrayed.

“No faked evidence” has been the watchword for so long that the idea of faking for the cameras now disturbs Ryan more than he’s willing to admit.

“We’ll just carry on as before,” Shane says, the night in late August before the first shoot, “and throw in a little spice here and there for the viewers. It doesn’t have to be a big thing.  It won’t get really weird until eps start airing and we have to do Postmortems,” he adds with a grimace.

Ryan frowns over his burrito. He hadn’t even thought about those. Interacting directly with the fans makes Shane edgy under the best of circumstances, and they both know that the dovetailing of the show and their “relationship” is going to bring the weirdos out of the woodwork.

“What do you mean, spice?”

“A pet name here, a side-hug there. You’ll get scared, I’ll, ah, _comfort_ you. They’ll eat it up.”

“The way you said the word ‘comfort’ just now was not at all comforting, just FYI.”

Shane waggles his eyebrows at Ryan and shoves at least three chips slathered with guacamole into his mouth. Some tiny part of Ryan hopes he chokes on them. He would, he thinks, make a very good grieving widower.

The next morning they fly out to Columbus, Ohio and rent a car for their trek to the Mansfield Reformatory. Ryan’s been excited to show Shane this place for months, both because of its reputation for spooky goings-on and because it was used as the shooting location for _The Shawshank Redemption_.

Like most of the old reformatories, asylums, and prisons they visit, Mansfield Reformatory is an active tourist site, and that does impede the spooky factor a little bit. In addition to a giant Halloween event, they do regular ghost tours, Shawshank tours, and private overnight ghost hunts—which is what Buzzfeed has booked for tonight.

Ryan drives the rental car out of the city and past a succession of corn fields, and Shane sticks his head out the passenger window like a dog and soaks up the hot air.

“Ah, the Heartland,” he sighs, ducking back in the car, clearly pleased to be back in the Midwest. “We should really be in a convertible right now, blaring Tom Petty. You should have a little scarf over your hair to protect it from the wind.”

“You’re so fucking weird,” Ryan says, and for a moment everything feels blissfully normal.

As Ryan predicted, Shane loves the Mansfield Reformatory. He’s more excited about the Shawshank connection than anything else, but Ryan still feels a shiver of pride when Shane punches him on the shoulder and says, “Nice one, Ry. This is pretty cool.”

The shoot starts an hour or two before dark so they can get some good exterior shots, and Ryan can tell within half an hour that it’s going to be exhausting. The fear associated with exploring haunted locations takes a lot out of him to begin with, but on top of that there are two layers of acting—acting for the cameras, and acting for the people _behind_ the cameras. Devon and TJ know them about as well as anybody else at work, or better. Even after covering their bases by telling the crew that they’re determined not to act married on camera, that mostly nothing will change about how they approach and film the show, Ryan’s still worried they’re going to fuck up.

Three hours in, they’re investigating the administration wing, where in the 1950s the then-warden’s wife accidentally killed herself after dislodging a loaded gun from its hiding place in a cupboard. Ryan’s got the spirit box out, trying to connect with the woman, whose name is Helen.

The box squawks out what sounds to Ryan like a woman’s voice. **“Didn-mean-‘o. Sor—”**

Ryan loses his mind a little bit.

“Did you hear that? Shane! She says she didn’t mean to, and—was that ‘sorry’?”

“I mean, it’s a radio, Ryan. We’re not that far out into the boonies.”

“That’s not how the spirit box works and you know it!”

They bicker a little, and then Shane looks straight at the camera. “Listen up, Shaniacs. I know there are some rumors going around that your boy is going soft on account of certain romantic entanglements, but let me set the record straight. I love this guy for his body and his mind, but he’s still a complete idiot.” Then he winks at the camera and walks away, leaving Ryan to splutter in his wake.

The first part of that had been pre-planned and scripted between them, to be whipped out at an opportune time, but the second part is improvised. Just this little stray compliment about Ryan’s body almost has him reflexively spitting out some dumb insult he doesn’t mean. He has to bite it back with a stern reminder to himself: _you’re supposed to be together, dumbass_.

Ryan mostly keeps it together until they’re coming back from exploring the guard tower. He and Shane are descending a steep, precarious set of stairs, Ryan in front, Shane just behind him, and TJ with the camera behind them. They’re about halfway down when Ryan feels an unmistakable push from behind, and not a gentle one. He loses his balance on the stair, arms windmilling wildly. He has just enough time to think _oh fuck_ before he’s falling, _falling_ —

At the very last possible second, Shane’s arms shoot out and grab Ryan around the chest, pulling him back with a jerk. They fall backwards together, onto the stairs, Ryan landing halfway on top of Shane with an uncomfortable thwack of hipbone against hipbone and tailbone against stone.

“Ryan, Ry, Jesus—are you okay?” Shane sounds rattled, and Shane does not rattle easily. “You could have. A fall like that, Jesus _fucking_ Christ.”

Ryan is dimly aware that he’s not responding, that he can’t respond, because he’s having a panic attack. He can’t breathe. His chest is a vice. He lies back on the staircase, gasping.

“Hey, hey, whoa. Ryan, you’re okay, you’re okay. Breathe,” Shane’s voice is in his ear.

“Pushed me,” Ryan croaks when he can speak, flexing his tingling fingers. “Something— _Shane_ —something pushed me.”

Shane doesn’t argue about it, doesn’t joke. He just tightens his arms around Ryan.

“Okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.”

They sit there on the stairs for a good five minutes, until Ryan can breathe normally again, can will himself to walk the rest of the way down. The whole time Shane sits there with Ryan, asking him questions he’s pulled up on his phone to make sure Ryan doesn’t need a doctor. Ryan doesn’t think he’s acting. It doesn’t feel like acting.

They push through the investigation. They’re supposed to sleep here overnight, alone, and Ryan’s dreading it. Shane pulls him aside just before the camera crew leaves for the night.

“Are you sure about this, man? We don’t have to sleep here. We’ve got a ton of footage already.”

“No, it’s—it’s fine. Let’s just do it, and then it’s done and we can go home.” Ryan realizes that for the first time ever, they’ll be going back from a shoot to the _same_ home. It’s a weird thought.

They end up putting their sleeping bags down on the floor of the chapel. Ryan lies awake for what feels like hours, tossing and turning. Every time he closes his eyes he feels that push, over and over again.

“Ryan,” Shane says some time later, his voice a sleepy croak. “What’s…?”

“Dude, I’m losing it,” Ryan says. He can hear how high-pitched and pinched his own voice sounds.

Shane rolls over to face Ryan.

“Okay, babe, this is just me. Don’t freak out.” Shane extends his hand; Ryan feels it rustle at the edge of his sleeping bag. Ryan reaches up blindly to grab Shane’s hand in his. Shane squeezes once, twice, and rubs his thumb over Ryan’s. Ryan isn’t even sure whether the camera can catch this, or if it’s even for the camera’s benefit at all.  
  
_Babe_ , really?

They fall asleep holding hands.

                                                                                             *

A few weeks later, Ryan is finally ready to think about it. _It_.

What happens is this: he wakes up one Sunday morning in early October, soft light pouring in through the slats of the shitty blinds, and realizes that the little wall of pillows that usually divides the bed into his side and Shane’s side has been demolished during the night.

He can tell because Shane’s pressed up against his back in sleep, arm curled around him, a perfect mimicry of the position in which he’d awakened in a Vegas hotel room the morning after _it_ happened. This time Ryan’s sober, fully-clothed, and too boneless and relaxed from sleep to kick up a fuss. This is just a thing that happens sometimes when you share a bed with someone, he knows now. It doesn’t mean anything.

He stretches a little, doing his best not to wake Shane. He points his toes, cricks his neck, rolls his wrists. Shane snuffles a little into his ear, and Ryan shivers.

Then Shane, still asleep, _rolls_ his hips into Ryan’s ass, a long, slow, subconscious motion that makes Ryan go still. Ryan can feel that Shane is hard against him, and he’s not sure what to do with that knowledge. He is himself hard, but he’s always hard when he wakes up, that doesn’t mean anything.

 _Don’t move_ , he thinks stupidly. _T-Rexes can’t see you if you don’t move._

Shane does it again, pressing his hips into Ryan with a low “Hmmm,” letting his hand trail along Ryan’s stomach just under his belly button. Shane must be waking up or awake already, but feeling sleep-stupid and reckless, Ryan ignores his own better judgment and presses his hips back into Shane. He grinds gently backwards, testing, and maybe it’s because he hasn’t gotten laid in four months, but his own dick isn’t _disinterested_. Four months is a long time.

 _That’s different_ , he thinks. Not bad different. Just—different.

“Ryan, what are you doing?” Shane rumbles into his ear, his voice low and scratchy from sleep.

“No fucking clue. You started it.”

“Do you want—” Shane’s hand twitches on Ryan’s stomach. It might be an offer.

“I don’t know.”

Shane lets out a long breath, Ryan can feel it against the back of his neck, and then he’s gently disentangling himself from Ryan, pulling his arm away from Ryan, putting distance between them.

“I’m gonna shower,” Shane says, and then he’s up and gone. “And make us some breakfast. Eggs?”

“Mmm,” Ryan agrees, listening as Shane rummages around in the dresser for clothes and makes his way to the bathroom. He can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed. He wonders if Shane’s jerking off in the shower, and the thought makes him feel warm all over.

Ryan hears the shower shut off, and then a few minutes later, Shane puttering around in the kitchen. He jumps in the shower himself, scrubs himself in a businesslike way, and refuses to reward his traitor of a dick with any extra attention. _You know what you did_ , he thinks darkly.

He dries off and throws on comfy weekend clothes, a worn pair of jeans and a soft navy t-shirt, and joins Shane in the kitchen. Fried eggs on toast are waiting, the eggs cooked exactly to Ryan’s preferred state of done-ness. This has become their Sunday morning ritual over the last couple of months, and he admits it is a cozy one.

“Thanks, man,” he says, sitting down on the couch with his plate. Shane’s sitting on the floor, long legs spread wide, an actual newspaper spread out between them. He’s bent over reading what looks like a book review, chewing on a piece of toast. He’s wearing his glasses, and his hair’s still a bit wet and unstyled, curling a little around his ears as it dries. The whole scene is strangely domestic, and it makes Ryan’s stomach clench.

For the first time ever, Ryan has the briefest flicker of an idea: _husband_.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Ryan says when he’s finished his eggs.

“Shoot,” Shane says, turning the page of his paper. He doesn’t look up.

“Have you? With a guy?”

Shane sighs, like he’s been expecting this conversation and not looking forward to it.

“Are you asking if I’ve had sex with a guy? I feel like we know the answer to this question already.”

“Other than—I mean.”

“Not a lot, but.  Yes.”

 “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked,” Shane says. Ryan remembers that this is more or less the exact line Shane gave to Mike months ago over shitty Vegas hotel burgers. At the time he’d taken it for one strand in their elaborate web of deception, had not recognized it for what it was: one of Shane’s small, closely-guarded truths.

“And it wasn’t a big thing, and I didn’t want to freak you out.”

“You thought I would freak out?” Ryan asks, hurt. What Shane does in his personal life is his own business, of course, but Ryan can’t stand the thought that Shane would keep things from him because he thinks Ryan would judge, would be disgusted, would reject him.

Shane looks up from his paper, finally, and snorts at the look on Ryan’s face.

“I didn’t mean it like that. You can get a little—bro-y, is all.  I think that stuff makes you uncomfortable, or am I wrong?”

“Maybe a little, but I wouldn’t have _freaked out_.”

“Fair enough. But then after,” Shane gestures around at their apartment as if to say _after this whole thing_ , “I was worried you’d think I’d, like, seduced you or something. Taken advantage. And it wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

“Sorry?”

“I believe you, but I don’t remember much of anything from that night. I’m asking what it was like, if you – if you remember.”

“Bits and pieces only,” Shane says. “And weirdly, very little from the actual wedding part, which you’d think would have been memorable. But it was…good. You were,” his lip twitches, fighting back a smile, and he looks back down at the newspaper. “Let’s just say that what you lacked in experience, you made up for in enthusiasm.”

“Oh Jesus,” Ryan says. He didn’t know what he expected, but the idea of Shane having this private, intimate memory of him that he doesn’t have makes him feel panicky. “I’m sure I was a fucking mess. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Shane says. “The marriage part was a fucking mess, but I don’t regret the rest of it. For the record.”

Ryan doesn’t know what to do with that.

“This morning,” he starts.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Shane says firmly.

“Why’d you get up?  You could have stayed.”

Shane gets up from the floor, long limbs akimbo as he rights himself and stands. He reaches for Ryan’s empty plate and his own, gathering them to be washed.

“You weren’t sure,” he says, taking Ryan’s plate from him. “I’m not here to be an experiment, or a warm body when you’re horny and feel morally incapable of fucking anybody else.”

Ryan doesn’t think that’s quite fair, but he also doesn’t know how to rebut it without playing his own hidden, secret cards, the ones he’s not ready to admit he’s holding yet.

“And we made a plan,” Shane says, heading for the kitchen.

“Maybe it’s a shitty plan!” Ryan yells after him.

*

The problem after that is that Ryan can’t _stop_ thinking about it.

They’re out at a bar one night with some friends from work, one evening in early December. It’s a Friday night and nobody has to work tomorrow, so everybody’s in high spirits. He and Shane usually hold themselves so carefully when they’re out with other people, make sure they don’t have too much to drink. They’ve proved they can’t be trusted with booze, and Ryan’s terrified one of them will confess the whole stupid plot to a sympathetic ear.

Tonight, though, they’re both a little looser than usual. It’s been nearly six months since Vegas, and their friends have stopped watching them like hawks, analyzing their every gesture and move. It’s become accepted fact that they’re together, which makes Ryan feel like he can have that extra beer or two.

It’s also been nearly six months since another human being touched his dick, and Ryan’s climbing the walls a little bit.

So tonight he does a shot—and then another for bravery—and corners Shane by the bar.

“Hey, hubby,” he says, leaning in a little too close. Shane leans back.

“Did you just say _hubby_?” he asks, laughing into his beer. “That’s unforgivable.”

“You heard me,” Ryan says. He’d been going for sexy but it comes out a little threatening, which just makes Shane laugh harder.

“Is that you, Goldsworth?” Shane asks, putting on his stupid 1950s Transatlantic accent. He leans back, back against the bar, surveying Ryan. His face is a little pink, a sure sign that he’s on his way to drunk himself, and his eyes are bright. His hair is mussed in a way that is, Ryan acknowledges, appealing.

“I have more questions and now I’m drunk enough to ask them.”

“Mmm, okay,” Shane says, looking dubious. Ryan takes the opportunity to lean forward more, resting his hands on the bar on either side of Shane, bracketing him. A little thrill goes through Ryan when he realizes that it doesn’t matter if any of their friends see.  He wishes he possessed the ability to loom over Shane, but that’s a pipe dream.

“What’s it like?” he asks, quietly enough that nobody behind him can hear.

“What’s what like?”

“Fucking a dude. What’s it like? Paint me a, a word picture.”

“A word—” Shane lets out a little incredulous huff. “Jesus, Ryan. It’s like sex, except there are two dicks and not a single vagina in sight.  Why are you so fixated on this?”

“I keep trying to imagine what we were like together, and I can’t. I don’t have a frame of reference. So I’m asking you to frame me a reference.”

“Can’t you satisfy your curiosity with porn like a normal person?”

“Straight porn is nothing like sex, so why would gay porn be anything like having sex with a dude? I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in—” he trails off.

“The real thing?” Shane asks, with a lift of an eyebrow.

“It sucks to do something like that and not remember it,” Ryan says, which might be manipulative, but it’s also true, and it works. Shane’s face softens into a little frown.

“Fair enough.” He looks around, making sure nobody’s within earshot, and leans in a little closer just to be certain.

“We didn’t fuck, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Ryan just looks up at him through dark eyelashes. Shane swallows, remembering.

“We got back the hotel. We went to my room. I—I carried you, I remember carrying you through the threshold of the door and throwing you onto the bed. I complained about how heavy you were, which, in retrospect, not very polite. We were laughing a, a lot.”

“It’s these muscles, baby!” Ryan says.

“We spent a long time just sort of rolling around on the bed, I think.”

“Limbs everywhere,” Ryan adds with a grimace.

“Are you telling this story or am I?”

“Sorry.”                                                          

“Well, stop editorializing. I got you off with my hand. You were—mouthy, seriously.”

“Really?” Ryan asks. He’s too tipsy to be embarrassed. Mostly he’s just curious. It doesn’t really sound like him.

“Yeah. You said some stuff I will _not_ repeat in public because I’m a man of substance and integrity. You, uh, you sucked me off, after.”

“Was I good?”

Shane throws his head back and laughs. He’s _so_ easy with the laughs tonight, and to Ryan it’s like a reward. Every time he makes Shane smile like that, laugh lines prominent and eyes crinkling, he gets a little jolt of accomplishment and pleasure.

“I mean, you had no idea what you were fucking doing.”

“Yeah, but.”

“Yeah, but,” Shane says, mimicking. “You were great. A cocksucking prodigy, killing it right outta the gate. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Yes,” Ryan says, and he can hear how petulant he sounds but he really can’t help himself.

“You’re such a competitive brat.  If Ryan Bergara’s going to suck a dick, he’s got to be the best goddamn—”

Ordinarily Ryan would be here all day for this banter, but he’s getting antsy, standing this close to Shane. He wonders if their friends are watching, and the thought that they might be makes him want to act out more, to perform.

He’s starting to get a bad feeling about how this whole marriage thing might have happened. He has a hunch it may have been his fault.

There’s no live music at this bar, but there is a dance floor and a pretty good DJ, and he can feel the beat in his spine, distracting him.

“Come on, Madej,” he says, holding out his hand, cutting Shane off mid-sentence. “Let’s fucking dance.”  

They’re not bad together, out on the dance floor. Ryan’s been out dancing with Shane plenty of times, and Shane always starts out terrible and then gets better and looser the drunker he is. He doesn’t have the sense of rhythm Ryan has, but he has the sense to let Ryan lead, to match the pace he sets and feed off his energy.

Ryan pulls Shane close, slots his leg in between Shane’s, wraps an arm loosely around him. For once he feels like the confident one, comfortable in his body.

“You’re very tall,” he observes, grinding against Shane like the beat of the music is goading him into it.  

Ryan can imagine how it happened now, that night in Vegas. He can imagine four drinks turning into five turning into eight, and the bassline pumping in his head. And Shane, his inhibitions down, crowding Ryan on the dance floor, getting in his space. He can imagine the music getting dirtier, the dancing getting dirtier, his own need to perform ramping up with it. He can imagine Shane’s tongue in his mouth, a hand reaching down to cup him through his jeans. Ryan’s still not entirely sure how that would have escalated to a quickie wedding, but this— _yes_.

Ryan reaches up, grabs Shane’s neck and pulls his head down so he can hear over the music.

“Let’s go home,” he says, and Shane nods.

*

The first thing Shane says when they get through the door of their apartment is, “We’re not having sex tonight.”

Ryan’s not even sure he’s there yet, but he doesn’t like being told he can’t do something just on principle.

“That felt like ‘we’re going to have sex’ dancing to me, back there,” he says, taking off his jacket and throwing it on a chair. He pours himself a glass of water, and one for Shane.

“I don’t want it like this again.” Shane says. “You’re drunk, I’m drunk. It got us into trouble before.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like we can get married again,” Ryan points out. He reaches down and peels his shirt off. The effect it has on Shane is visible and immediate. Ryan tosses his head back, chugs his glass of water. He’s not used to putting on a show for his partners this way, and it’s kind of thrilling. He figures this is probably why women wear lingerie.

 “When—if—Ryan, pay attention, this is real shit. If we do this, I want you to actually remember it the next day.”

“I’m not _that_ drunk, dude.”

“Maybe, but I don’t want to risk it. I’m saying no.”                                                   

“I respect your decision,” Ryan says. He makes a decision of his own.

“I’m going to go to the bedroom,” Ryan says, unbuttoning the top button of his jeans for effect, “and I’m going to jerk off. I’m going to leave the door open. Whatever you do—or don’t do—with that information is your business.”

He stalks down the hallway, and he can feel Shane’s eyes on him the whole way.

In the bedroom, Ryan kicks his pants off, tries to think. He’s feeling too tipsy and reckless to stage this too much, but he turns on a lamp, turns off the overhead. Good lighting is crucial, after all.

 As promised, he leaves the door wide open.

He strips off his boxer briefs, sits back on the bed, and discovers that he’s really fucking nervous. He rummages in the top drawer of the bedside table, comes back with a tube of lotion.

Ryan closes his eyes. He lets his thoughts drift to that night in Vegas, filling in the gaps in Shane’s story with his own imagination. He’s hard—he’s been hard for hours, it feels like, since they were dancing—and he knows it’s not going to take much to get him there tonight, but he wants to be a little showy about it all the same. These days it’s not often he gets to really do the thing properly, because Shane’s always around.

He thinks back to what Shane said. _You were mouthy._ He grips his dick, hand slick with lotion, and pulls slowly. He can almost feel Shane’s weight on him, bearing down, pushing him back onto the headboard. Shane’s hand on him would be big, bigger than his own, long fingers curled around him carefully.

He thinks Shane would take him apart meticulously, with the same focused single-mindedness he affords to his work. Ryan matches his stroke to that, long and purposeful, and groans.

Ryan’s eyes are still closed as he works himself over, but when the air in the room changes he knows—knows without seeing or hearing him approach—that Shane’s there, watching him. The thought of being seen like this, completely naked on the bed, hand around his cock, is almost enough to make him come right there.

Ryan opens his eyes, and sure enough, Shane is leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed in a way that could almost be described as casual. Ryan has the sudden urge to cover up, to pull the sheets over himself. Instead he arches up into his hand and whines.

“Jesus, Ryan,” Shane says. “Holy shit.” Ryan locks eyes with him, and then looks him up and down as he strokes himself. Shane’s eyes are wide. The pink flush from earlier has spread down his neck past his collarbones, disappearing below his henley. Ryan can see that he’s hard, can see the bulge in his jeans, and he increases the pace of his hand on his dick.

“Are you just going to stand there,” Ryan says through gritted teeth, “or are you going to talk me off?”

“Who _are_ you?” Shane says, laughing, but his hand is already down his pants. “Jesus, I’ve created a – a sex monster.  Do you want to hear how well you sucked my dick, Ryan? Is that what this is about?”

God, Ryan is so close already. He definitely wants to hear that, and he moans again so Shane knows he’s on the right track.

“Because you did,” Shane goes on, one hand working in his pants, the other gripping the doorframe. “You came, and then you had my dick out before I even realized what was happening. You were so fucking eager.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you—you kept trying to take too much, gagging on it, _God_ , Ryan, look at you, I can’t—”

“Eyes on the prize, Madej,” Ryan says, twisting his wrist again.

“You, ah, ah, you asked me to, to grab your hair. You said, ‘show me,’ and I did, I grabbed your head and guided you down on my cock and it was fucking perfect.”

“Oh fuck,” Ryan says. He sees it, can almost feel Shane’s hand on the back of his head, holding him steady while he slowly feeds Ryan his dick. And that’s the ball game. Ryan can’t hold out any more and he’s coming all over his hand and his stomach, hard, making a mess of himself and the sheets both.

Ryan is only dimly aware that Shane is coming himself, hand down his jeans, sweaty and flushed against the doorframe. He’s disappointed to be missing it, but he’s still coming down from his own orgasm.

Shane recovers first, goes into the bathroom to clean himself up a bit. He comes back with a wet washcloth, which he hands to Ryan wordlessly for Ryan to wipe off his stomach and chest.

“This wasn’t in the plan either,” he says, a warning in his voice.

“Yeah, well,” Ryan says, reaching for his boxer-briefs, “Plans change.”

*

In the light of day, things get awkward, more awkward than they’ve been for months. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that there are Rubicons you can’t cross as friends and still expect to come out the other side of unchanged. Eye-fucking across a room while jerking off turns out to be another one of the things on that list, as Ryan and Shane are discovering together.

They spend the next couple of weeks carefully skirting around each other, giving each other a wide berth. Shane starts staying up late, falling asleep on the couch, and Ryan doesn’t know how to man up and ask him to come to bed because it sounds too _married_.

Ryan doesn’t sleep as well when Shane’s not there.

Soon the day he’s been dreading arrives. It’s December 23, and they’re flying to Illinois, to Shane’s parents’ house. Ryan remembers Shane’s promise in the hotel room all those months ago (“You’ll meet him at the holidays, I promise”) and knows there’s no wriggling out of it.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to look these people in the eye and pretend to love their son. He’s no longer sure he’s going to have to pretend at all. He’s not sure which of those two options makes him more nervous.

“Are you up for this?” Shane asks as they’re loading their carry-ons into the Uber that’s come to take them to the airport.

Ryan twists the silver wedding band around his left ring finger. They’ve been wearing the bands on and off for a few months, since people started asking why they didn’t wear rings. He knows older people expect to see them, so they made a point of wearing them today.

“The only way out is through,” he says, because it sounds sort of wise but also noncommittal at the same time. He’s not really sure what it means, but he’s definitely heard somebody say it.

“When’s the last time you brought someone home?” Ryan asks a few minutes later, as the Uber is slowly winding its way up to the terminal.

“It’s been a few years. I don’t do it much.”

“Ever bring a guy home?”

“No,” Shane says. “But it won’t be a big deal. I think they’re madder that we eloped than anything else.  Midwesterners regard every missed opportunity for a casserole potluck to be a grievous sin.”

Ryan knows Shane talks to his parents regularly; he leaves the room when they call, and Shane talks to them in hushed tones. He doesn’t know what Shane’s told them about him. He wonders if Shane is already planning his escape plan, laying the groundwork for their scheduled breakup, and the thought is strangely upsetting.

He falls asleep against Shane’s shoulder on the plane, lulled by the tinny music coming from Shane’s ear buds. As he dozes off, some of the tension between them melts away.

*

It’s snowing by the time they land at O’Hare, and by the time they get out to Shane’s parents’ house in Schaumberg the ground is already generously dusted with white. It looks, Ryan grudgingly admits, very picturesque.

“What is this? It looks like a Burt Ives song threw up all over your hometown,” Ryan says with a scowl as they wind their way down a fetchingly snow-covered lane. There are evergreens everywhere and the air smells crisp and also somehow minty.

“It’s _Burl_ Ives,” Shane says. “And don’t be a Grinch. It’s beautiful and you love it.”  

Ryan can tell that Shane’s a different person out here, back home. His face is already a little softer-looking, his edges sanded down. His eyes are brighter. Ryan tries to imagine baby Shane growing up here, corn-fed and happy, and the thought makes him smile.

They pull the rental car up in front of a two-story house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Ryan can only just see the Chicago skyline in the distance, but the swirling snow won’t keep it visible for long.

Shane pulls their bags out of the backseat, squares his shoulders like he’s gearing up to march into battle. He sticks out his hand. Ryan pauses for just a fraction of a second, uncertain, before he takes it. Shane’s hand is warm and dry under his. Ryan doesn’t know if this is for his benefit or for someone who might be looking out the window.

They walk up to the front door together, hand in hand. Before Shane pulls his hand away to knock, he runs his pinky against the metal band on Ryan’s finger. Ryan shivers, and it’s not just from the cold.

*

Shane’s parents are, of course, _disgustingly_ lovely people. They welcome Ryan like a son and don’t point out any of the obvious facts, like how until about six months ago they thought he was just one of Shane’s random oddball coworkers.

Ryan feels like a piece of shit the minute Shane’s mother hugs him.

She turns from him to Shane, pulls back to look her son in the face. Her eyes are teary and Ryan feels like he shouldn’t be here for this, like he’s intruding on a family moment. He realizes with a start that in the technical sense he’s family now.

“Shane, honey, I’m happy for you,” she says. “You’re both so, so welcome here.” She brushes a bit of hair off of Shane’s face, out of his eyes.

For one horror-filled moment, Ryan thinks Shane’s going to cry too. But then Shane pulls himself together and his face falls into a practiced smile.

“Guys, this is Ryan,” he says. “My husband.”

To his credit, he doesn’t stumble over the word at all.

They get through dinner with a combination of rehearsed stories and half-truths, and if they’re convincing, well, they do this for a living. But the guilt is getting to Ryan and Shane must be able to tell, because after dinner he tosses Ryan a scarf and gloves from the hall closet and pulls his own coat on easily over his shoulders.

“Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

“But it’s snowing.”

“Yes, I know it’s snowing. Come on, princess, I promise you’ll like it.” He leans in close, helping Ryan with the zipper of his coat. “You’ve gotta have this done up, it’s cold out.”

Shane takes Ryan’s gloved hand in his, leading him out the door and into the snow.

It’s like walking out into a snow globe. The ground is totally blanketed in white now, snow swirling in a dozen different directions. Everything is quiet, muffled by the snow cover, and all the houses are covered in twinkling Christmas lights. There aren’t even any of those tacky blow-up yard ornaments around to ruin it.

Shane is quiet, too. Ryan isn’t quite sure what to do with this Shane, who is yet again different than any he’s seen before. He thought he knew every version of Shane like the back of his hand by now, but this version feels younger, less sure of himself. Ryan has the sense of being handled with care, like he’s a delicate thing that might break if mishandled.

“You’re upset,” Shane says as they walk. They’re still holding hands, even though they’re out of sight of the house, and Ryan doesn’t pull away.

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “I am upset. Your parents are so nice, and we’re lying cretins. They’re dreaming of little adopted grandbabies and big family vacations to the Cape, and we’re going to trample all over it in four to six months.”

“Not all white people are just longing to summer on the Cape, Ryan,” Shane says. “We’re not _Kennedys_.”

And then— “Don’t think about that. Can’t we just…” he trails off.

“Can’t we just what?”

“Can’t we just have this for now?” Shane gestures around with his free hand, a gesture that encompasses the snow, and the lights, and them. “Don’t you want to?”

Ryan breathes in, and then out. His breath makes a frozen cloud in the air. He _does_ want to, just about as much as he’s ever wanted anything in his whole life.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

Shane stops walking, gets an arm around his waist, and pulls him so close that Ryan can see the individual snowflakes glinting wetly on his eyelashes. His face is so earnest, so prickle-free, that Ryan wants to memorize it for later.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Shane says, very seriously. Ryan experiences a perverse desire to grab a handful of snow and shove it down the back of Shane’s coat.

And then Shane is kissing him— _for_ _real_ kissing him. Passionately, tongue-in-his-mouth kissing him. There’s nobody watching, nobody to judge them or evaluate them, nobody to perform for. It’s just them, alone in the snow. It’s freezing but Ryan is warm all over, all the way down to his toes.

Ryan doesn’t know how long they stand outside. Eventually he pulls away, wiping his mouth.

“This is an embarrassing cliché of a situation,” he says. “This is a Hallmark movie. You do know that, right.”

“Shut up,” Shane says fondly, sticking his hands in the pockets of Ryan’s coat, spinning him around back in the direction of the house. “Let’s go get warm.”

*

Later that night, after a cup of hot chocolate, several board games with Shane’s parents and brother (all of which Ryan loses by wide margins), and a warm shower for each of them, they go to bed.

“Is this your old childhood bedroom?” Ryan asks, lugging his suitcase into the room Shane indicates at the top of the stairs.

“Yeah. Well, it’s the guest room now, but it was mine.”

“No girly pictures on the wall anymore, I see.”

“ _Girly pictures_? What is this, 1975?”

Ryan flops over on the bed and drapes himself across it.

“Nice. Comfy.”

Shane spends a good five minutes puttering around the room, putting things away, checking his bag for things he can’t seem to find. Still sprawled across the bed, Ryan watches him upside-down, trying to ignore the blood rushing to his head.

“Shane.”

“Hmm?” Shane freezes, kneeling beside his bag for the third time in as many minutes.

“I’m trying really hard to be chill over here, but your slow-mo frenzied searching is killing the mood for me.  Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not in that fucking bag.”

“Sorry,” Shane says, sitting back on his heels and then rocking back onto the floor. “I just—I’m afraid we’re about to ruin this.”

“Mmm,” Ryan says, rolling over onto his stomach to try to clear his head. “Wouldn’t want to ruin a perfectly good fake real-marriage.”

“I don’t know what to do with you. You look different to me here.”

“Different how?” It’s settling for Ryan, somehow, to know that Shane is feeling as misplaced as he is, here together in a new place, in a new way. It eases his need to be combative.

“At home you’re my friend Ryan. My friend who—fine, _fine_ —I kind of want to look at naked sometimes. It’s whatever, stop fucking smirking at me. But here I guess I see you the way they see you.”

“God,” Ryan says, “I hope your mother doesn’t want to look at me naked, because that’s going to make breakfast awkward.’

Shane turns his head, laugh muffled into his shoulder. “I’m trying to say something here, you asshole.”

Ryan sits up on the bed and takes his shirt off, because this has a proven track record of making Shane shut up.

“Well, you’re doing a shit job. Let’s just have this, remember? It’s Christmas.  Merry Christmas to us.” He throws his shirt at Shane, hits him square in the chest.

Shane exhales so heavily it’s almost a sigh. He gets up from the floor, ungainly, and crawls up onto the bed next to Ryan.

*

In the end, it isn’t at all how Ryan imagined this would go.

For the last couple of months they’ve been building to something. After all that build-up—coupled with the fact that neither of them have gotten laid in nearly half a year—he expects frantic, explosive, desperate. He expects they’ll fuck now, hands over mouths to muffle their noises, and think later. He assumes they’ll push at each other, tease, fight for control.

He doesn’t think they’ll be on Shane’s childhood bed, Shane’s eyes soft in the dim light from the bedside lamp, Shane’s hands hesitant as they rove over Ryan’s back, his shoulders, his sides.

They make out for a while, sitting up against the headboard, necks craning at awkward angles. Ryan thinks that Shane must be waiting for him to move things forward, to prove that he wants this, so obligingly he reaches for the hem of Shane’s t-shirt and drags it over Shane’s head.

“I’m not going to bolt, man,” Ryan says. “You don’t have to handle me with kid gloves.” He rests his forehead against Shane’s for a moment, eyes closed. Shane’s unruly hair flops down to tickle his face and Shane runs a hand through it to push back.

“Fair enough,” Shane says, pressing a quick kiss to Ryan’s jaw. “Okay, just—let me—”

Shane maneuvers Ryan back against the bed so he’s mostly horizontal and positions himself just off Ryan’s right side, half on top of him. On top of him enough that Ryan pushes up, _up_ against the pressure of Shane’s right hip and leg and hisses at the contact. _Fucking finally._

He could get off like this, just rubbing against Shane, still in his flannel pajama bottoms, but Shane has other plans.

Shane’s right hand is working down Ryan’s chest and stomach, stopping every once in a while in its general downward path to tweak a nipple, to trace Ryan’s ribs, to stroke his hipbone. Finally he reaches the waistband of Ryan’s pants, threads his fingers through the drawstrings with a meaningful pause, and looks at Ryan.

Ryan juts his hips up into Shane’s hand, conveying _yes, please_ , or else _fucking do it already_ , and Shane unties the strings and slips the PJs down Ryan’s thighs and then off. Ryan’s not wearing anything under them, and he chokes off a groan when Shane’s hand wraps around him a second later and squeezes.

Shane proceeds to take Ryan apart—gently, carefully, but with the sort of blistering intention that makes Ryan’s whole body go dizzy and overheated under his gaze. His fingers are clever and purposeful, his grip is just right, and Ryan can’t help bucking up into his hand and then laughing under his breath at the embarrassing intensity of his reaction.

Ryan can tell by the twisting in his gut that he’s not going to last long at all. No one’s touched him for months and months, and no amount of perfunctory jerking off in the shower can prepare a person for this kind of focused attention.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “Oh fuck, Shane, if you don’t—I can’t,” and Shane’s backing off, loosening his grip around Ryan’s dick, slowing his stroke. He walks his fingers down Ryan’s shaft, cups his balls, rolls them around in his hand with great care.

“Jesus Christ,” Ryan exhales as Shane’s long fingers move further back to press at the sensitive spot behind his balls. His face burns at the intimacy of the touch, but he rolls his hips into it nonetheless. Shane massages at that spot again, and then his index and middle fingers slip back further still to very softly brush against Ryan’s hole. Ryan swears at the sudden surge of adrenaline and arousal he feels and makes himself look at Shane, who is watching his face. 

“If you’re trying to slow this down,” Ryan says through gritted teeth, “it’s not—fucking—working.”

Shane smiles a crooked smile, and returns his palm to Ryan’s dick, using some of the precome beading at the top to slicken the way for his hand.

“It’s okay to come, Ry,” he says. “In fact, some would say that’s kind of the point.”

“But I want—you. I want us—”

“What do you want?” Shane’s hand has picked up the pace again and it’s making it hard for Ryan to verbalize.

“Want to touch you too,” Ryan says, breathing heavily with the effort of not coming. Then Shane’s pulling his hand away, leaving Ryan to half-laugh, half-groan into the crook of his own elbow at the loss.

“Well, shit, man.  Knock yourself out.”

It turns out that months of sleeping in a bed with Shane has not prepared Ryan for being _in bed with Shane_. For starters, Ryan’s not as focused as he should be for this, his own dick throbbing insistently in time with the heartbeat in his ears. Also, there’s just a lot of real estate to explore. Just when he starts to focus on one part of Shane—the lean muscles of his forearms, for example—he discovers something new: Shane’s defined collarbones, or the trail of sparse hair on his stomach that disappears into his sweatpants, and gets distracted all over again.

Determined to find a better angle, Ryan rolls over on top of Shane, straddling his hips. He sinks down, testing, pressing his ass against Shane’s lap and feeling him hard against him. Shane reaches a hand down to stroke Ryan’s dick again, but idly, without rhythm.

“How do you want this?” Shane asks.                          

“Lose the pants,” Ryan says, and Shane hurries to comply, doing a complicated uncoordinated shimmy under Ryan that makes him shiver.

Ryan doesn’t _know_ how he wants this. He’s just driving forward on instinct, doing what feels good and counting on basic biology and Shane’s relative experience to get them where they need to be. He changes his angle, pressing down against Shane, and can’t hold back a quiet groan when their dicks slide against each other. Jesus, that’s a new feeling.

“Hmm,” Shane says. He spits into his hand, which Ryan thinks would probably be gross if he wasn’t reaching down to wrap his hand loosely around himself and Ryan both, saliva coating them, making the friction so much better. “Okay, now—move,” he says, and Ryan obeys, fucking up into Shane’s hand. It feels so good he wants to cry out, has to lean down to stifle his noises against Shane’s chest so they don’t wake up the house.

He rubs his dick up against Shane’s through the grip of Shane’s fingers, again and again, until Shane is panting beneath him and Ryan can’t hold back anymore.

“Shane—I’m gonna,” Ryan warns, and Shane just rasps out, “Yeah, yes, do it,” tightening his hand around them both and surging up to kiss Ryan hard. Then Ryan is coming all over Shane’s hand, Shane’s dick, Shane’s stomach. Shane groans into Ryan’s mouth and he’s coming too, his free hand clenching at Ryan’s waist hard enough to bruise.

They lie there for a minute, Ryan on top of Shane, breathing into each other’s’ necks. Then Ryan rolls off, onto his back, and reaches around for Shane’s t-shirt.

“You’re a mess,” Ryan says, half-heartedly swiping at Shane’s stomach and chest with the shirt.

“Oh well,” Shane says with a shrug, but he wipes his hand off on the shirt when it’s offered.

The other thing Ryan hadn’t been expecting is the way he feels now, after. There’s a lump in his throat that he associates with being on the edge of tears, although he outright refuses to be the guy who cries after sex. He wants to curl up to Shane, kiss him through the post-coital endorphin haze.

Ryan reluctantly re-categorizes sex with Shane in his own mind. He takes it out of the “It’s Just Sex!” box and places it in the smaller, much more dangerous “Sex with Feelings??” box. The whole thing is just a lot more intimate than he’d been prepared for. Ryan supposes it’s just what happens when you live in such close proximity to someone for this long before—consummating? That’s not exactly the right word, but it’s close.

“That was really good,” Ryan says, looking up at Shane, who has his eyes closed. “No homo,” he adds.

Shane’s eyes fly open, and when he sees Ryan grinning at him he throws his head back against the pillow with a massive eye-roll.

“You little shit,” he says.  “You’re the actual worst. Come here.” He pulls Ryan close, throws the blanket over them.

“Was that what Vegas was like?” Ryan asks. Shane is quiet for a long time, enough time that Ryan thinks maybe he’s fallen asleep.

“Actually, no,” he says eventually. “I don’t think it was.”

“Why not?”

“Dunno. Drunk Ryan is…fun, don’t get me wrong, but. Sober Ryan is real Ryan, and therefore infinitely preferable.”

“How dare you, I contain multitudes.”

“Mmm. I don’t doubt it. This was still better. I can trust this. I can take this to the bank.”

Ryan wants to get the last word, but he’s too sleepy and too comfortable. Instead he just burrows into Shane’s chest and tucks his head under Shane’s chin.

“Merry Christmas, Ry,” is the last thing Ryan hears as he drifts off. He thinks Shane might be saying something else, something more, but he’s too close to sleep now to figure it out.

*

So Ryan’s in love with his husband, and it’s pretty fucking inconvenient.

For starters, there’s nobody he can talk to about it. He can’t go to his friends for advice, like he might normally do with a crush. The only person who understands their situation enough to be helpful is Shane himself, which is a no-go for several reasons.

Ryan can’t bear to see Shane’s face rearrange itself into polite sympathy. He can imagine it, can clearly visualize Shane shifting on the couch, leaning forward to put a sympathetic hand on Ryan’s shoulder. Telling him he’s just confused by the fooling around. Telling him they have to stick to the plan. After the emotional roller coaster of the last several months, Ryan just can’t stand it, so he resolves to keep quiet and just—wait it out.

He Googles “how to date your husband,” but the results aren’t very helpful because for the most part they do tend to assume that the husband in question is in the loop about the whole situation. He gets sucked into a Wikipedia shame spiral and before he knows it it’s two AM and he’s reading about the five love languages while his phone battery dies.

Without meaning to, he starts posting a lot of photos of Shane on Instagram. They’ve spent a lot of time together since last June, but both Ryan and Shane have been wary of changing their social media presences too much, so it’s mostly been confined to Unsolved shoots and other work stuff. Now, though, Ryan leans into it. He doesn’t have anything to lose.

Shane, on a chilly afternoon hike up Echo Mountain, making a stupid face for the camera.

Shane, in their apartment, prodding at a pot of something on the stove with a wooden spoon and wearing an apron with little Santas embroidered on it even though it’s February.

Shane on the floor of Ryan’s parents’ house before Sunday dinner, swarmed by dachshunds and delighted about it.

Shane in Ryan’s bed, sweaty and mischievous, basking in having bestowed unto Ryan a truly first-class blowjob. (Ryan doesn’t post that one, but he does keep it on his phone. He looks at it…a lot.)

People notice, of course.

_what have we done to deserve this quality shyan content??_

_my face is clear, the sun is shining, my crops are f l o u r i s h i n g_

_I CANNOT WITH THESE BOYS AND THEIR F*ING MARITAL BLISS_

One day Ryan’s trying to covertly snap a picture of Shane playing Battlegrounds—bent over the controls, face intent, late afternoon sun hitting his hair and the planes of his face in a way that’s really very striking—when Shane pauses the game.

“Ryan?”                         

“Hmm?”

“Whatcha’ doin’?”

“The lighting’s really good in here right now.”

Shane rests his chin in his hand and levels his gaze at Ryan.

“No. What are you _doing_?”

Ryan puts his phone down.

“I like looking at you,” he says, holding Shane’s gaze. “I’m sorry, I’m making it weird.”

“You’re not making it weird. It’s just weird.”

“You look—good. Sorry.”

“Stop saying sorry. You look good too.  You creep.”

Shane goes back to his video game. Ryan looks down at the phone in his lap, swallowing back a smile.

*

“Got any big Valentine’s Day plans?” Steven asks Ryan the Monday before. Without waiting for Ryan’s answer, he launches into a long story about how his girlfriend is visiting this weekend and they’re going to go cosmic bowling and probably, Ryan doesn’t know, drink malteds and walk hand-in-hand on the boardwalk together or some shit.

“Nothing special. Quiet night in, I think,” he says, cutting Steven off at the earliest possible opportunity. He’s pretty sure Shane doesn’t even realize it’s almost the holiday. In fact, he’s certain he’s seen Shane roll his eyes about Valentine’s Day before. He’s probably one of those guys who complains about how it’s a corporate lie.

Ryan likes Valentine’s Day, has always liked it. A whole day just to celebrate loving someone. It’s nice.

“Naw, man!” Steven says. “It’s your first one as old marrieds. You should do it up right. I know some places you could probably still get a reservation—”

And he’s off again, name-dropping some of the fancy places where they’ve filmed for Worth It.

“We get it, you’re a food rock star,” Ryan says, rolling his eyes. “Shane’s not really into the gooey romantic stuff.  We’ll probably just watch a movie or something.”

“Netflix and chill, sure, sure.”

Ryan is 99% sure Steven has no idea what Netflix and chill means, and he doesn’t bother to enlighten him.

After he gets home from work that night, though, Ryan gets to thinking. Maybe he could do something a _little_ special to mark the occasion. Shane is certain to think it’s stupid, but he’s been working crazy overtime hours on Ruining History lately and Ryan wants to do something nice for him.

Ryan starts to plot in earnest.

He makes a shopping list:

  1. Spaghetti
  2. Tomato stuff
  3. Parmesan cheese
  4. Meat??? google this
  5. Loaf of bread, fancy bread not regular bread
  6. Flowers—NOT ROSES!!
  7. ~~Lube~~
  8. ~~Massage oil~~ ugh ~~~~



When he’s done he looks over the list with a critical eye. It’s…not great. But it’s a start.

Wednesday is Valentine’s Day, and sure enough, Shane doesn’t really say anything about it to Ryan on the way to work. He _is_ wearing that pink button down that Ryan likes, though, which he supposes could be some sort of super-secret sign.

Ryan wishes, very much, that he wasn’t at the point of analyzing Shane’s clothing for secret messages about the status of their relationship, but that’s not the card fate has dealt him.

Shane’s busy all day with Ruining History stuff, and he doesn’t so much as blink when Ryan says he’s going to cut out a bit early today.

“Sure, man,” he says. “I’m going to be here for another hour or two working on this, but I’ll see you at home.”

Ryan grabs an Uber to the grocery store, where he joins the ranks of husbands feverishly doing their last-minute Valentine’s Day shopping. He spends an entire five minutes in the personal care aisle, trying to compare various lubes and massage oils without appearing to be doing just that. In the end he shoves one of each at the bottom of his basket and walks off, face scarlet.

When he gets back to the apartment, he pulls up the recipe for spaghetti Bolognese and flails around the kitchen for a while trying to get his bearings. Of the two of them, Shane is the cook. Ryan’s the king of takeout; his major meal contribution is washing all of the dishes when Shane’s done dirtying them, but he thinks he can handle spaghetti.

While the sauce is simmering (it smells more or less right, Ryan thinks), he grabs a shower and changes from the t-shirt and jeans he wore to work into a button down and slightly nicer jeans. He wants to look nice, but not like he’s trying too hard. He spends way too long in front of the mirror trying to decide how many buttons to leave undone. This is already more non-shoe-related thought than he’s put into an outfit in, oh, years.

Ryan puts the bread in the oven to warm, dumps the pasta in the water, and sits around jiggling his leg for the full eight minutes while it cooks. He sets the table, fussing over the silverware. He Googles whether the knife goes on the right side of the plate or the left.

It’s nearly 7 pm and he’s just starting to worry about what he’ll do if Shane is super-late when he hears the key in the lock and springs up to add the pasta to the sauce for it to heat up, like the recipe suggested. It’s dumb, but he wants Shane to find him in the kitchen, preferably with an attractive sheen on his brow and a serious, chef-y look on his face.

_Oh, this is so stupid._

He hears the door open and close, and the jingle of Shane’s keys as he sets them on the shelf by the door.

“Ryan?”

“Yeah, man, I’m in here.”

“You’re in the _kitchen_?”

Shane pops around the corner, looking nonplussed. He takes in Ryan, stirring the pasta around in the sauce to coat it. He notices the button down, raises his eyebrows just a fraction.

“What’s, uh, what’s going on in here, then?”

“I figured you’d be tired. I made dinner.”

“You made dinner?” Shane mimes looking around for takeout containers.

“Sometimes I make dinner!”

“Ryan, you’ve never. Not in the entire time we’ve—you’ve never made dinner _once_.  I didn’t even know you could boil water.”

Shane surveys the kitchen again, looks more closely at the little kitchen table. At the modest but pretty bouquet of red and orange flowers in the vase at the center.

“Did you. Are those real flowers?”

“The flower shop lady said they’re called ranunculus. I remember because it sounded like a disease, and of course I said that out loud to her and she got kind of offended, I think.”

Ryan catches himself rambling a little and trails off.

“You made me dinner! You got me flowers! _On Valentine’s Day_ ,” Shane says, and Ryan can’t tell if he’s imagining the accusatory note in his voice. Ryan does the first thing that comes to mind, which is to throw Steven Lim under the bus immediately and without regret.

“It was Steve’s stupid idea, he said I should,” Ryan gestures around, “make it a thing.”

He thinks maybe Shane’s upset with him. Maybe he’s pushed this too far, made it too couple-y. Shane’s just looking at him with this weird fucking look on his face that he can’t read.

“I’m sorry, I know we didn’t talk about it,” Ryan adds, but Shane’s shaking his head. The weird face resolves itself into Shane’s usual smile, easy and all the way up to his eyes.

“No, hey, Ry. It’s great. I love it.”

Shane insists on dishing up the pasta and grabbing them both a beer, and then they’re eating at the actual table like adults. Like adults on a date. Now that they’re sitting there, looking at each other across the flowers, he’s not sure what to say. _We’re doing this whole fucking thing backwards._

“So how was your day, dear?” Shane asks with a sly grin, taking a swig of his beer and cackling at the look on Ryan’s face.

Shane tells him a little bit about the episode he’s researching. Not much, because Ryan likes to be surprised when he shows up to film, but he drops a few tantalizing hints. Ryan recounts the horror show that is Ralphs after five on Valentine’s Day, although he omits the few minutes he spent agonizing over personal lubricants.

“It’s just all these dudes wandering around looking shell-shocked, picking up shit at random that they think their wives might like,” Ryan says, throwing back his second beer.

“I’m sure they thought the same thing about you,” Shane points out.

“Yeah, well.” Ryan shrugs, as if to say, _and_ _were they wrong_?

“I’ll make it worth your while, baby,” Shane says with a wink, and Ryan chokes around the bottle and comes up coughing. He doesn’t know what to do with the sudden deluge of pet names.

They clear the dinner things up together, and Ryan’s not entirely sure what comes next. They’ve been fooling around here and there since Christmas, but it’s been very—piecemeal. They find each other when they’re bored, or lonely, or horny. It doesn’t really have that long-term vibe going for it yet, and Ryan has vague, half-formed dreams of fixing this with some good old-fashioned penetration. He just has to figure out how to get there.

As it turns out, the problem solves itself, because Ryan forgot to hide the bag containing the sex accoutrements. The bag’s still lying there, on the couch, which Shane discovers by flopping down directly on top of it.

“Ow, what…”

“Oh, shit, don’t—" Ryan reaches out an abortive hand to grab for the bag, but it’s too late. Shane’s reach is the stuff of legend and Ryan doesn’t stand a chance.

“Oho, what have we here?” Shane says, sticking half his head in the bag nose-first. “You _are_ full of surprises today.”

Every single bone in Ryan’s body is urging him to find the nearest blanket and hide under it, but he won’t. Tonight’s going well, and he’s a fucking grown-up, damn it. A _married—_ accidentally, drunkenly married, but married nonetheless! — _adult_ who needs to can ask for what he wants.

“I thought we could try,” he says, sort of lamely. “If you want.”

Shane’s cheeks are pink, whether from the beers or the prospect. He blinks a couple of times, as if clearing his head.

“Are you sure?”

Ryan remembers when Shane asked him this question months ago. He hadn’t been at all sure then, but he is now.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it, and—”                  

“You’ve been thinking about this?” Shane scratches his nose in a way that may have been designed to look nonchalant and might even have worked, except for how his eyes have gone sharp and alert, the laugh scrubbed off his features.  

“I mean, not. Not, like, all the time. Not like I’m wandering around in a daze just thinking, _oh, Shane, give me your big dick_ all day, but.”

Shane exhales and absent-mindedly works two fingers under the collar of his shirt, tugging a little at the neck. Ryan didn’t know people actually did that in real life; he always thought it was just one of those little gestures that works its way into movies and shows as easy shorthand. He could watch Shane do that all day long, long fingers up against his neck, collarbone just poking out from under an undone button.   

“You can’t just say stuff like that.  Now every time I see you I’m going to assume you _are_ thinking that and I’m going to have to, to, —to quit work and join a monastery or something.  Fucking go to the International Space Station for a year or some shit.”

“Sorry.” Ryan’s not sorry. He’s not even sure why they’re still talking. Shane must sense that his patience for flirtation is waning, because he draws his legs up under him on the couch and leans forward.

“How do you want to do this?”

“Do I need to draw you a map, man?  I thought you said you’d done this before.”

“No, like—there’s two ways this could go, right. So pick your poison.”

“Oh,” Ryan says, understanding. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Shane might offer—that he might want—

“I’m just saying it’s on the table, if you’d rather ease into it. Dip your toe into the pool.  I want you to be, to be comfortable, and it’s not for everybody.”

Ryan considers. The truth is that he wants to try everything. He absolutely wants to screw Shane into the fucking mattress. He’s been half-hard in his jeans off and on for most of the evening, a combination of Shane’s distracting mouth wrapped around a beer bottle and what might be an intimacy boner, but the situation’s getting difficult to ignore. His mouth goes dry at the thought, imagining it, but it’s not what he had in mind for tonight.

“I—for sure, yes. Yes, let’s try that, uh, soon. But I already showered and stuff, so maybe tonight—”

Ryan’s still not comfortable with this part, the frank conversations. Sex with women has always been easy, in the sense that it’s usually pretty clear to all parties involved who will be doing what and mostly he can just jump into things and see where they go. But there’s also something undeniably sexy about laying it all out on the table for your partner to pick up: _this is what I want. This is how I want it_.

So he takes a deep breath, licks his lips, and he doesn’t let himself look away from Shane’s face when he says, “I really want you to take me into the bedroom and fuck me.”

*

Probably it’s true that this isn’t for everybody, but Ryan discovers very quickly that it _is_ for him.

The essential logistics decided, Shane stands up from the couch, the bag containing the lube wrapped around his wrist. He directs Ryan into the hallway and the bedroom with an exaggerated sweep of his free hand and a gentlemanly “After you.”

 He looks pretty calm and collected, which is unsettling to Ryan because he feels like he’s about to rattle apart with nervous energy and want. There’s something infuriating about Shane, an essential _coolness_. An easy charm that breaks through his occasional physical awkwardness, and which Ryan both admires and craves for himself. Maybe it’s the couple of extra years Shane has on him, time he’s used to become self-assured, to know himself.

Shane sits on the bed, drops the bag within reach, and pulls out his wallet from his pocket. He takes a condom out of a little inner pocket and drops it next to the bag. Then he leans back a little, feet planted on the floor, and looks at Ryan with intent. He doesn’t seem so gentlemanly now.

“Boy scout,” Ryan says with a raise of his eyebrow.

“Don’t get cute,” Shane says. “Take your clothes off. I want to see you.”

There’s something about Shane’s tone that makes Ryan want to comply. He scrambles out of his jeans, nearly falling over in the process. He unbuttons his shirt a little slower.

He shrugs the button-down off his shoulders, pulls off his undershirt. Shane lets out a low whistle.

“You want me to, like, do a little dance for you?” Ryan asks sarcastically, trying not to blush or withdraw at the way Shane’s leering at him. Trying to meet him step-for-step.

“Maybe some other time.  Come over here.”

Ryan walks over to the bed to stand in front of Shane. Shane spreads his legs a little more, enough to pull Ryan in just a hair closer. He reaches both hands out, strokes over Ryan’s belly, his hipbones, and then palms Ryan’s dick through his boxer-briefs. The touch, _fucking finally_ , makes Ryan hiss, and his abs clench as his dick jerks unbidden against the fabric.

Shane peels Ryan’s underwear down so slowly that Ryan almost snaps at him to get on with it, but something holds him back. It does seem like Shane has a plan here, and while Shane’s plans have not historically been without snags, in this case Ryan’s willing to hear him out.

Shane gets Ryan’s dick in his hand, and then he’s bending down a little—even seated he’s too tall—to get his mouth around it. Ryan’s hands go to Shane’s hair immediately, like a reflex. Not directing the show, just anchoring himself in the feeling.

Shane’s pace is almost painfully slow, his mouth more exploratory than anything else. Ryan’s experienced blowjobs where Shane’s really trying to get him there fast—in the morning, late for work already, both of them in a hurry to get off and get moving—and this isn’t that. He’s being _warmed up_ , Ryan knows, and the promise sends a fresh jolt of toe-curling arousal down his spine.

Shane pulls back a little and lets his tongue perform a complicated, sloppy little maneuver around the head of Ryan’s dick. Ryan has to pull his hand off Shane’s head to prevent himself from fucking in and busies himself with unbuttoning the few buttons of Shane’s shirt that are within easy reach.

After another minute Shane pulls back further, all the way off, and Ryan can only stare with glassy eyes at the little string of saliva that connects from Shane’s mouth to the tip of his dick because it’s the hottest thing he’s ever seen. He wishes he could take a picture of _this_.

“I want to—there’s something I want to try,” Shane says. He’s got a hand in his lap, pressed against his own erection, as he wipes his mouth with the other. His usually-sleepy eyes are wide. “But you really have to tell me if you don’t like it. Like, the absolute _second_ you don’t.”

“Yeah, whatever you want,” Ryan says. He’d probably do anything at this point. He’d jump off a bridge. His heart feels like it’s about to explode.

“Lie down on the bed,” Shane says, standing to undo his own belt and finish unbuttoning his shirt. He turns around for a minute to pull off his pants, and Ryan takes the opportunity to flop down on his back on the bed. He pulls his arms up behind his head to watch (and because he knows it’ll make his biceps look good).

Shane turns back around, naked now except for his own trunks.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the view,” he says with a wry smile, “but turn over. On your stomach.”

Ryan flips himself over, and his insides do a complicated little flip to match. He feels vulnerable like this, but in a good way. He peers back over his shoulder at Shane, who rubs the back of his thighs reassuringly.

“Okay,” Shane says again. “Okay.” He moves his hands from Ryan’s thighs, massages his ass.

“Dude, you look like you’re steeling yourself to fight somebody.  I’m a little intimidated right now, not gonna lie.”

“No, it’s just new for me too, and I want it to be good.”

Ryan’s not completely sure what’s going on, but he has an inkling of an idea, one that makes him involuntarily rut against the bed when it connects in his brain. He stifles a groan.

“Shane, I mean it. Do whatever you want with me.” He lets his head fall back down on the pillow. He’d love to try to watch, but he’ll get a crick in his neck.

Then Shane is massaging with more focus, pulling Ryan’s ass cheeks apart. Ryan feels the pad of a finger run along the seam of his ass and come to rest on his hole. Not pushing, just rubbing. This isn’t an area Ryan’s explored particularly well on his own, but when he has it didn’t feel like _this_.

“Whoa,” he says, letting his breath out with a whoosh. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding it.

“Good whoa?” Shane asks. His finger stops moving.

“Good whoa.  Don’t, um.  Keep going?”

“Keep going, or don’t keep going?” There’s a welcome little teasing note in Shane’s voice now.

“Please don’t make me beg for this, you asshole,” Ryan says, and Shane lets out a low little _hmm_ m, like he’s considering doing exactly that. But then he’s bending down, angling himself low on the bed over Ryan, biting into the curve of his ass gently.

“I’m not sure you’re in the position to be calling people assholes right now, Ry,” Shane says quietly. Then he’s leaning in to apply his tongue to Ryan’s hole, licking a slow gentle path, and Ryan is swearing into the pillow, a steady and uncreative string of _fuck fuck shit Jesus fuck_ ing _Christ_.

Shane spends about five minutes licking Ryan open. It’s—completely unlike anything Ryan’s ever experienced before. His self-consciousness leaks away almost instantaneously. His whole body feels like an exposed nerve, like a fraying wire seconds away from touching metal.

He doesn’t know if this blind _unthinking_ , this pure sensation, is a normal reaction to getting your ass eaten and he doesn’t care. All he can do is push back against Shane’s tongue, and rub his dick forward into the bed, and whine useless non-words.

Shane pulls back after Ryan makes a particularly stupid noise. When he speaks, his voice is husky.

“I—you should see yourself right now. Jesus Christ.”

Ryan arches his back, stretching showily, and looks over his shoulder again. Shane’s rocked back on his knees. His hair’s a fucking mess, sticking up in about four different directions. His mouth is red. There’s a little wet patch on the front of his trunks where his dick’s leaked pre-come, and Ryan wants to pull them off and taste it. He looks notably less composed.

“I can’t take much more of this,” Ryan says. His voice sounds hoarse and foreign to his own ears, and it breaks a little over the _this_. “I won’t last another minute, seriously.”

Shane leans down, over the side of the bed, and he comes back up with the bottle of lube and the condom. He sets the condom up by Ryan’s head, next to the pillow, and snaps open the bottle.

“Can I?” He snickers a little at Ryan’s vigorous little nod.

“Hmm, up,” Shane says, pulling Ryan up onto his knees. Ryan leans over on his elbows, deeply regretting the loss of contact with the bed. He wants to reach down and touch himself, but if he does that he’ll come immediately.

Shane upends the bottle of lube and drizzles some on his pointer finger. He very carefully presses in, just barely, and waits for the nervous tension in Ryan’s shoulders to dissipate a little before pushing in more. Ryan shifts a little, knee to knee, and then rocks back, little tentative movements to adjust to the unfamiliar stretch.

It feels—pretty good, actually. But weird.

“This feels so weird,” he huffs out. Shane rubs a hand up his side, warm and reassuring.

“Yeah it does,” he agrees. “Do you want to stop? It gets good, but if you don’t—”

“No, don’t stop.”

“Okay, you’re pretty relaxed, I actually think—” And then Shane’s pulling out slowly, carefully, and applying more lube to a second finger.  “This is better. Less clinical.”

And it is immediately better: fuller, more intentional, more present. Before Ryan knows it he’s pushing back on Shane’s fingers and Shane is bracing his other hand on Ryan’s lower back to get better leverage. He scissors his fingers a few times, brings them together, and _rubs_.

“Ohhh, shit,” Ryan moans, low and quiet, and he shudders. Nothing has touched his dick in minutes but it doesn’t matter because his dick isn’t running the show any more. There’s a warm sort of pressure in his belly that’s building and building until the whole lower half of his body is trembling. He’s never felt anything like it but he wants to chase the feeling, find out where it goes.

Shane laughs. He does it again.

“There it is,” he says, and presses a kiss to the base of Ryan’s spine. “Look at you. Fucking magical.”

He adds a third finger.

“I—Shane—you have to fuck me now, you have to. If I don’t come soon I’m going to actually cry, and I don’t wanna be that guy crying with a dick up his ass,” Ryan says, pulling from his last reserves of strength to be coherent.

“Hot,” Shane says, slowly pulling his fingers out and wiping them on his underwear. “Um, can you—turn back over. I think it’s better that way. You don’t have Valentine’s Day sex on your hands and knees.”

He bends down, rubs himself against Ryan’s ass. He says, right in Ryan’s ear, “And I want to see your face when you come your brains out on my cock.” He reaches around, gets his hand around Ryan’s dick, and Ryan’s brain shorts out.

Ryan remembers things only in snippets after that, waves of sensory memories: rolling the condom on Shane with shaking fingers. Shane looming over him, balancing on one elbow, pushing into him so slowly, so carefully, a shocking drag of sensation on the verge of pain.

“Hang on—wait a minute, I need a, I need a minute,” Ryan says, adjusting to Shane’s size—much bigger than fingers. Shane’s eyes, closed, his knuckles white at Ryan’s waist and bicep like he needs a minute too.

And then, eventually—moving, and that new pressure building again, and Shane’s hand on Ryan’s dick, stroking to the rhythm as best he can, pushing Ryan right up to the edge of what he can bear and then over it. Shane leaning down to kiss him open-mouthed and murmuring a litany of half-formed thoughts, shockingly dirty things Ryan wouldn’t have even thought Shane could want, let alone say.

And finally, coming, wordlessly and without warning. Scrabbling at Shane’s back for purchase, pinned to the bed by the weight of him, feeling seen and _known_ and unable to hold out a single second longer. Boneless, triumphant joy when Shane follows a handful of strokes later, coming into Ryan with a low groan, sweaty face pressed to Ryan’s neck. 

And then only the sound of his breathing, and Shane’s breathing, and Ryan’s own pulse in his ears, and Shane laughing again, low and sweet and surprised.

*

Shane’s tender with him, after. When the sticky cooling of come on their skin becomes unbearable, they shower together, the water piping hot almost to the point of discomfort. Shane washes Ryan’s hair, massaging his scalp while Ryan presses against him to stay under the spray of the water. _They’re the same thing, love and attention_. Where has he heard that? He hopes it’s true.

Ryan groans when Shane’s fingers dig in right at the base of his skull, just above the back of his neck.

“This is the best Valentine’s Day anyone has ever had. God.  I could sleep for a week.”

 _I love you_ , Ryan wants to say. _I fucking love you_. He doesn’t say it because he doesn’t want to ruin this day in his mind if Shane doesn’t say it back.

“Yeah, we did alright,” Shane says. He quells under Ryan’s glare. “More than alright,” he clarifies.

“We’re going to have to change your nickname through formal channels,” Ryan says. “Shane ‘Bone Stilts’ Madej is dead. Long live Shane ‘Eats Ass Like a Champ’ Madej.”

“That’ll go great on the merch,” Shane says, straight-faced.

They change the sheets and crawl into bed. Ryan’s still not a huge sleep-cuddler, but tonight he wants to be touched, and he throws his lower leg over Shane’s and threads their hands together.

“I do, you know,” Shane says, voice heavy and low, close to dropping off to sleep.

“Do what?” Ryan asks. Shane’s talking like he’s picking up some earlier thread of conversation, but Ryan doesn’t recall it.

“Love you.”

“Oh,” Ryan says, like his heart isn’t about to beat its way out of his throat. “Yeah. I love you too, you big idiot.”

“Love…and attention,” Shane mumbles, and then he’s asleep. Ryan’s last thought before he follows is, _I didn’t think I said that out loud._

*

It’s almost April before either of them realizes they don’t have the first clue how marriage works, logistically speaking. Frankly it’s a fucking miracle they managed to accomplish the thing at all, that’s how little they know about it.

It first occurs to Ryan when he sits down to take a first pass at his taxes and remembers they can file jointly if they want to. He searches the little filing cabinet where he keeps important papers.

“Hey, uh, Shane?”

“Yeah?”

“Were we supposed to, like, get a copy of a marriage certificate at some point?”

A few minutes pass while they both frantically Google on their phones.

“Okay,” Shane says. “We can order a certified copy from the Clark County Clerk, or we can go pick one up in person.  I vote mail, obviously.  We can never be trusted to go back to that town again.”

“Oh my God,” Ryan says still staring at his phone. “What if—what if—”

Shane waits him out.                                                       

“We’ve been married for almost eight months now, it’s been this whole _thing_ , and we don’t even know for sure we’re married.” 

“What do you mean? We have the pictures. We have the receipts, literally.”

“Yeah, but the officiant has to file the marriage license with the county after the ceremony. For all we know, we could have bought the license and then backed out, or the officiant could have failed to send the license in. There’s a whole, like, process. We don’t _know_.”

Shane stares blankly at Ryan. Then he dives for his laptop. Ryan crowds around his shoulder, watching as Shane pulls up the Clark County records search function and types in his own name. He spells it wrong two different times in his haste.

“Date. Uh. Shit, Ryan, what was the fucking date?”

Ryan scans his memory. He knows it was sometime mid-month. June 17th? 18th?

“Just set the range for all of last June.”

“Remind me to be mad at you for not knowing our anniversary later,” Shane says reprovingly, selecting the date range.

“You didn’t know either!”

Shane presses “Submit” and they both watch the little wheel spin as the database performs its search.

They both exhale as the database pulls up the result. One Shane Alexander Madej did indeed marry one Ryan Steven Bergara, June 19, 2017 in Clark County, Nevada. Seeing it there on the screen in black and white makes it seem very real and very official.

Shane types his credit card number in to order the certified copy. Ryan’s hands are shaking, and he crosses them behind his back so Shane won’t notice. The idea, however momentary, that this might have all been for nothing, that they might be officially nothing to each other after all—he can’t stand it.

Ryan finally lets himself think about the growing feeling of dread in his stomach that’s been building over the last couple of months. The eight-month mark has come and gone, they’re well into the time frame they had designated for extricating themselves from this marriage, and Shane has yet to suggest that they put their divorce into motion. Every day Ryan gets up and he thinks, _maybe today_. And hopes, _maybe not_.

Ryan’s not ready; he might never be ready. He likes their life as it is. They spent so long pretending to be married that they pretended it into reality, and now he doesn’t want to go back to acting like they aren’t what they are to each other.

Shane starts to laugh, and once he starts he can’t seem to stop. He doesn’t seem to notice that Ryan is having a very quiet freak-out next to him.

“I can’t believe we did this whole elaborate—” he wheezes. “—and we didn’t fucking, we didn’t even _check_. We just woke up naked and were like, yep, must be married! What is wrong with us?”

Listening to Shane laugh, thinking about this near miss, is making Ryan dizzy. Abruptly he feels like he might fall over, and he squats down and grabs the arm of Shane’s chair for balance.

“Hey—whoa, Ryan. What’s up?”

Ryan just shakes his head and takes a few deep breaths. When his head stops spinning he stands again.

He remembers he’s trying this new thing where he says what he’s really thinking and asks the universe for what he wants, so he puts it out there.

“I’m not ready to get divorced,” he says, as casually as he can manage. He braces himself for Shane’s questions— _why not, Ryan? What about the plan, Ryan? What are you **feeling** , Ryan?_—but instead Shane is nodding slowly.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. It seems like a lot of hassle, doesn’t it? Divorce?”

“ _So_ much hassle,” Ryan says. “We didn’t even know how getting married works, so think of all the research we’re going to have to do.” Okay, so. Part of what he’s really thinking, anyway.

“And standing in lines, probably. Like the DMV, but worse,” Shane says.

“And explaining things to people.”

“And lying again.”

“And paperwork.” Shane makes a face. “And we’re a couple of busy guys, so.”

“ _So_ busy,” Ryan agrees. He feels like he might be selling this too hard, but Shane seems to be buying it. For a moment he allows himself to wonder if Shane’s casualness about this is as feigned as his own is.

“We’ll deal with it in a few months,” Shane says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Or maybe this fall.”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “Maybe.”

*

June comes, and they don’t deal with it. They don’t talk about it either, but they don’t deal with it.

Instead they throw a party.

It’s _not_ an anniversary party. It’s not a vow renewal. It’s just a party with all their friends and family on a day that happens to fall two days before the day that is technically their one-year anniversary.

Okay, so Quinta bakes a cake that happens to say “HAPPY ANNIVERSARY LOSERS,” but that doesn’t make it an _anniversary cake_.

Shane’s mom gives them a blender they’ll probably never use, but it’s definitely _not_ a belated wedding present.

                                                                                             *                                                                                             

September comes, and they don’t deal with it.

Instead they film a new season of True Crime and they adopt a dog from a local rescue, a scraggly but sweet black lab mix named Cooper (“Like DB Cooper, Ryan! We _have_ to take him home now.”). If it’s irresponsible to bring a dog into what will surely become a broken home, well, they don’t talk about it.

*

They don’t deal with it in December either. Ryan’s parents surprise the whole family with a vacation to Mexico, which would obviously be a terrible time to announce marital struggles.

Instead Ryan finds a nice abandoned beach and fucks Shane into a sand dune until he begs for mercy. Then he takes Shane back to their hotel room, rinses him down in the shower, and fucks him again for good measure.

That night when his dad introduces Shane to an old family friend as Ryan’s husband, it has the unmistakable ring of truth. Finally, after all this time, it finally feels true—in real life, as on paper.

Ryan’s not sure if it’s really possible to accidentally get married after all, but he thinks it might be possible to accidentally _stay_ married. He’s going to ride this train as long as Shane will let him. He thinks that might be a really long time.

*

_July 19, 2017. 10:38 pm. Hakkasan, Las Vegas._

Ryan’s whole body is electric and he feels like he’s burning up with it, like Shane should be able to feel the heat of him through their layers of clothing. He pushes in closer to Shane, _closer_ , as close as you can get on the dance floor without being cited for public indecency, and grinds desperately against him.

In some tiny corner of Ryan’s mind he knows how they must look, he knows that people must be staring—although one of the satisfying things about Vegas is that you’re never the biggest train wreck. He knows their friends are here somewhere. For the first time in his life, that he can remember, he just doesn’t give a shit what people think about him.

The push of his body against Shane’s, Shane’s tongue in his mouth, is a long exhale after holding his breath for ages: finally, finally, _finally_.

He doesn’t want to stop dancing, but he needs to get Shane alone and he doesn’t want it to be in a bathroom at one of the most popular clubs in Vegas.

“Let’s leave,” he tells Shane with all the brazen honesty that many drinks has afforded him. “This is great, but what if we were nakeder, though.”

“ _Nakeder_ , really?” Shane asks, but he lets himself be tugged off the dance floor and through the crush of people and out the doors. They get lost in the MGM Grand about six times trying to escape the casino for the fresh air.

“Your place or mine?” Ryan asks, as if their rooms back at the hotel aren’t a floor apart.

“Either, fuck, I don’t care. Let’s—can we just walk? I wouldn’t mind sobering up just a little.”

They stagger up the street, find themselves in front of the fountains at the Bellagio.

Ryan’s in a drunk haze, blissful and out of time. They stand there for maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen, he doesn’t know. His desire for Shane is like an itch; now that they aren’t pressed together he can almost ignore it, but it’s still there. A reminder and an exhilarating promise.

The fountain show starts, and for a moment it’s truly spectacular. Magical, even. Him and Shane on the verge of something, the light mist from the water rolling over their sweaty faces a relief from the oppressive heat of the desert summer. They’ve been transported somewhere else.

Then the fucking music starts.

_Every night in my dreams / I see you, I feel you  
That is how I know you go ooooonnnnnnnnnn_

Ryan _loses_ it. Suddenly he’s bent double, wheezing with laughter. The absurdity of it all, of standing here with Shane, one last pit stop on their road to bonetown, of having this beautiful experience marred with fucking My Heart Will Go On—it’s all the most Vegas thing he’s ever heard of.

“Is this really happening right now?” Shane asks. “Am I hallucinating this?” Ryan’s laughing too hard to answer him. It’s all so surreal. It makes him bold, suddenly. This town is fucking _daring him_ , and he’s not a man to stand down from a dare.

He stops laughing.

“This is a sign,” he says to Shane. “The world is fucked. We should—we should do something crazy. Something really—something insane.” He probably looks insane right now himself: three sheets to the wind, hair a mess, eyes watering from laughter, but he doesn’t care. All he wants to do is lean into this moment, to be someone else. Someone who takes risks and gets what he wants.

(“ _Once! More! You ooooopen the door!_ ” Celine wails.)

“Let’s rob a casino,” Shane says. “Pitt and Clooney style.  We’ll assemble a plucky team of ne’er-do-wells and Keith can be Julia Roberts.”

“No,” Ryan says, a glint in his eye that says trouble. “Let’s get fucking _married_.”

“Excuse me?”

“Let’s get married. Like, right now. Tonight, this is the, the best—I want—I want to be all in.”

He waits for Shane to talk him down, to reintroduce reason and logic to this conversation. To bring Ryan back to earth. But Shane’s just looking at him, eyes bright, lips parted. Just fucking staring, and instead of being chastened Ryan can feel his momentum building to a glorious crescendo. For once, for fucking once, he’s the one who’s sure.

“Did you just propose to me, man? With a Celine Dion song playing in the background?  They wouldn’t even let your wasted ass get married right now.”

Ryan’s frustrated that Shane isn’t taking this seriously. He wants to seal this deal.

Ryan drops to his knee right there on the promenade. He’s fishing around in his back pocket for the cherry Ring Pop he bought from Sugar Factory earlier that evening. It feels like a bit, when he finds it there waiting, but also a little like fate.

“Shane Alex—um, shit—Alexander Madej! Will you marry me right now and, uh, make me the happiest man in the, you know?”

“Jesus Christ, Ryan, stand up.”

“Not until you say yes!” This is already by far the craziest thing Ryan has ever done. It’s exhilarating. He wishes Shane would hurry up and say yes so he can kiss him again.

Shane is doubled over himself, laughing so hard it's gone mostly silent, too drunk himself to be embarrassed at the spectacle they’re making.

(“ _Love can touch us one time! And last for a lifetime!_ ” Celine adds helpfully. Shane laughs harder.)

“Fucking—okay. Sure. Yes. Give me the Ring Pop.”

And then Ryan is getting up, nearly falling into Shane because he’s so dizzy and probably also because of all the shots. Then he’s grasping up for Shane’s shoulders, grabbing a fistful of hair, and kissing Shane as hard as he can. Shane reciprocates, grabbing Ryan at the waist to steady him. Returning the kiss as fiercely as it’s given. He melts into the kiss, and Ryan can feel the last vestiges of Shane’s reluctance melt away with it.

In that moment it doesn’t matter that until about two hours ago they were (mostly) straight. It doesn’t matter what their friends will think, what their family will think. Those will be puzzles for their future selves to solve.

For tonight there’s only them laughing their way into this kiss, and the fountains, and that fucking stupid song, and Shane’s hand—improbable Ring Pop and all—on Ryan’s chest, over his heart.  


End file.
